Overdiagnosed

I am very averse to taking medicine, and since reading The China Study I have put away all my supplements except for B-12. I have seen and experienced good Western medicine for things like bacterial infections and broken bones. But I have also seen questionable medicine for many other things. There is the tendency to prescribe pills to treat symptoms, rather than treating underlying causes (such as eating the wrong stuff). Then, when the pills for the symptoms cause side-effects, there is the tendency to prescribe more pills for that.

Most annoying is the tendency to confuse “average” with “normal”. I don’t care if the average American man my age loses sexual vigor and dies early from a heart attack. That is not normal and not acceptable for me. Doctors are trained to always speak with absolute authority, despite the fact that they have had negligible training in nutrition. They get paid for seeing lots of patients and giving them pills, rather than making them well.

I recommend Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch and others. It explores many of the badly broken features of our modern “health care” (more like “disease management”) system. Doctors and insurance companies face perverse incentives. That not only causes us to spend a large portion of our health care dollars on the wrong things, but can be tragic when an unnecessary test gives false or inconclusive results, leading to more tests, unnecessary procedures, side-effects and complications, and occasionally, death.

A 2016 Johns Hopkins study attributes over 250,000 deaths per year in the USA to iatrogenic causes; in other words, medical errors. That makes health care the third leading cause of death.

It may be even worse in the mental health arena. See Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker. It may make you angry or keep you up at night.