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posted by n1 on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-walk-it-off dept.

From Men's Journal:

Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.

Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.

What do you people think, will people change if they know this?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:46PM

    by Zinho (759) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:46PM (#97920)

    Excellent reply, that's exactly what I was looking for.

    I'm sorry to hear that you're importing the worst part of our medical culture; having businessmen take over hospitals here has been a bigger disaster than their takeovers of the tech sector - at least when HP gets driven into the ground no one dies.

    I'm holding out hope that regardless of the system in place the doctors who are healing people for the love of humanity will stick around and keep being motivated for the right reasons. The stats I quoted seemed to put the U.S. and U.K. at about the same level of outcome, and I'd like to take that as evidence that the horror stories we've heard about each others' systems fall within the (unfortunate) norm. Medicine is hard. =(

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  • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:56AM

    by cafebabe (894) on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:56AM (#98016) Journal

    Form follows function. Private healthcare in the US has spawned a large industry of medical software. Through the NHS wanting to modernize and computerize and through software houses seeking additional sales, US medical software is now widely deployed in the NHS. This has stratified the NHS in addition facilitating financial settlement between administrative boundaries. Unfortunately, this fails and it has now become routine for parts of the NHS to sue other parts.

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