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Brownlee's latest book is Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.
Last week, nine physician specialty societies announced a list of 45 treatments and tests that doctors should prescribe far less often or stop doing entirely. Each specialty society’s list is part of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Choosing Wisely campaign, a long overdue initiative intended to get physicians to think twice before giving patients [...]
For weeks, we’ve been hearing about the Catholic Church’s objections to requiring health insurers to cover contraception, with conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh calling a young law student a “slut” for her support of the requirement and Congress making noises about legislation permitting employers to deny coverage for any medical procedure they found morally objectionable. [...]
I have an early-onset type of cataract, and my vision has gotten so bad I’m ready for surgery. As a patient, I’m not too happy about being in this situation, but as a health-care-policy wonk, this seems like the perfect opportunity to test one of the central tenets of conservative health-care-reform plans: comparison shopping. Conservatives think [...]
Last week, Kaiser Health News broke a story about hospitals marketing directly to former patients they’d identified as smokers by offering them discounted CT scans for lung cancer. “A 10-second scan could be life saving,” said the headline on a flyer put out by St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Penn. University Hospitals in Cleveland promoted [...]
Imagine yourself in front of your computer, looking up information about a drug prescribed by your doctor. Your Internet search tells you that there is a cheaper, maybe even a generic version available, but you have just paid top dollar for the brand name drug. You also learn that another treatment may be safer than [...]
Last month, an essay posted by retired physician Ken Murray called “How Doctors Die” got a huge amount of attention, some negative but mostly positive. Murray tells the story of an orthopedic surgeon who, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, chose not to undergo treatment. The surgeon died some months later at home, never having set foot [...]
Imagine you are sitting in first class on a plane, waiting for the plane to push off from the gate, when you see two people in uniform, the pilot and co-pilot, dash from the Jetway into the cockpit. A few seconds later, a voice comes over the intercom, saying, “This is Captain Jones, please be [...]
When Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering pill, went off patent last month, it was supposed to be a turning point in the era of the blockbuster drug, and in many respects, it was. In its heyday, Lipitor was worth nearly $13 billion annually worldwide and losing a drug’s patent usually leads to a huge decline in sales [...]
Here we go again. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision earlier this month to withdraw approval for the cancer drug Avastin for treating women with advanced breast cancer was met with anguished pleas from patients, and accusations of government rationing from conservatives. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., called it a “government take-over of health care.” [...]
Everybody knows obesity is a massive problem in the U.S. It rivals smoking in terms of its health hazards, according to a report in the February 2010 American Journal of Preventative Medicine. As a society, we’ve made great strides, giant leaps even, in reducing rates of smoking. Smoking bans on airplanes, in public buildings, in [...]
About a year ago, I accompanied my 80-year-old mother on a visit to the cardiologist’s office. She had been having unexplained dizzy spells and a rapid, irregular heart beat and was in for tests to see what the problem was. After the first test, we sat with the electrophysiologist, who explained Mom’s results. Actually, the [...]
Last week’s news that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force now recommends that men should not get a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test has been a hard pill for many men to swallow, at least judging by the flood of outraged responses from prostate cancer survivors who believe that getting a PSA test saved their [...]
