Butchered By Healthcare What To Do About Doctors Big Pharma And Corrupt Government Ruining Your Health And Medical Care

HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE "HEALTHCARE," THE LARGEST AND MOST CORRUPT INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. ✪ Learn what works. ✪ See through the lies. ✪ Handle hospitals. ✪ Find trustworthy doctors. ✪ Master your drugs and quit them with confidence. ✪ Consider holistic medicine. Healthcare is the top cause of all our overdue debts and personal bankruptcy. Our medical spending per person is double that of other countries', but fully half the treatments are ineffective or harmful. Immense, predatory industries such as angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery victimize us. These procedures cause complications and deaths, but few patients survive even a day longer. Most back and endoscopic knee surgeries are equally worthless. Seventy percent of us are on prescriptions, and 20 percent take over five. One in six uses psychiatric medicine, which commonly causes irreversible brain damage and premature death. Millions are now addicted to prescription opioids. Fifty-thousand people die each year from overdoses. The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year. Money short-circuits everyone's integrity, but there is an alternative. Patients and doctors can still prevail. Learn the system, and you can too.

HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE "HEALTHCARE," THE LARGEST AND MOST CORRUPT INDUSTRY IN AMERICA. ?? Learn what works. ? See through the lies. ? Handle hospitals. ? Find trustworthy doctors. ? Master your drugs and quit them with confidence. ? Consider holistic medicine.Healthcare is the top cause of all our overdue debts and personal bankruptcy. Our medical spending per person is double that of other countries', but fully half the treatments are ineffective or harmful. Immense, predatory industries such as angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery victimize us. These procedures cause complications and deaths, but few patients survive even a day longer. Most back and endoscopic knee surgeries are equally worthless. Seventy percent of us are on prescriptions, and 20 percent take over five. One in six uses psychiatric medicine, which commonly causes irreversible brain damage and premature death. Millions are now addicted to prescription opioids. Fifty-thousand people die each year from overdoses. The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year. Money short-circuits everyone's integrity, but there is an alternative. Patients and doctors can still prevail. Learn the system, and you can too.

HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE "HEALTHCARE," THE LARGEST AND MOST CORRUPT INDUSTRY IN AMERICA .✪ Learn what works. ✪ See through the lies. ✪ Handle hospitals. ✪ Find trustworthy doctors. ✪ Master your drugs and quit them with confidence. ✪ Consider holistic medicine Healthcare is the top cause of all our overdue debts and personal bankruptcy. Our medical spending per person is double that of other countries', but fully half the treatments are ineffective or harmful. Immense, predatory industries such as angioplasty and coronary artery bypass surgery victimize us. These procedures cause complications and deaths, but few patients survive even a day longer. Most back and endoscopic knee surgeries are equally worthless. Seventy percent of us are on prescriptions, and 20 percent take over five. One in six uses psychiatric medicine, which commonly causes irreversible brain damage and premature death. Millions are now addicted to prescription opioids. Fifty-thousand people die each year from overdoses.The FDA allows big Pharma to falsify the studies required to patent drugs. These corporations hire armies of ghostwriters to stuff websites and medical journal articles with marketing lies. Finding the truth is now nearly impossible. But all this gets overlooked as the companies pay billions of dollars in criminal settlements nearly every year. Money short-circuits everyone's integrity, but there is an alternative. Patients and doctors can still prevail. Learn the system, and you can too.

Doctors in Denial examines the relationship between the Canadian medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, and explains how doctors have become dependents of the drug companies instead of champions of patients' health. Big Pharma plays a role in every aspect of doctors' work. These giant, wealthy multinationals influence how medical students are trained and receive information, how research is done in hospitals and universities, what is published in leading medical journals, what drugs are approved, and what patients expect when they go into their doctors' offices. But almost all doctors deny the influence and control the drug companies exert. In this book Dr. Lexchin urges the medical profession to make the changes needed to give priority to protecting and promoting patients' health and benefitting society, rather than enabling Big Pharma to dominate health care while raking in billions in profits from citizens and governments.

With our health care system both dysfunctional and constantly changing, how can doctors actually keep us healthy and safe? The spread of COVID-19 has brought the lives of doctors into sharper focus than ever before. We now see how the daily work of making important, even life-and-death decisions is frequently made harder. Hospitals and medical offices face budget problems, the influence of big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, as well as stress and long hours and massive amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork. And that was before the pandemic. In this important book, Dr. Robert Pearl--the former CEO of Permanente and a Stanford professor--shows how all these stresses have led to a toxic culture in medicine. Doctors resist change, leading to important clerical mistakes. They don't offer equal treatment to nonwhite patients. Their competitive work ethic leads to burnout and bad decisions. All these mistakes can be and frequently are matters of life and death. As we engage in a public debate about the appropriate role of government, technology, big pharma and insurance companies in our health care, we've paid little attention to what it actually feels like to be a doctor. In our rush to express gratitude for "frontline" doctors, we are also neglecting their humanity, for better and worse. If we want to improve medical outcomes, for doctors and patients alike, we need to start seeing health care professionals as the real and flawed human beings they actually are. Uncaring is a breakthrough book that draws just such a portrait, and offers a prescription for a safer and healthier system.

Pharmaceuticals constitute a relatively small share of the total Health Care expenditure in most developed economies, and yet they play a critical role in the ongoing debate over how best to advance, improve, and afford Health Care. Despite this, and perhaps because of this, the industry has had, for many years, an outsized claim to fame and controversy, praise and criticisms, and support and condemnation. Unfortunately, many participants in the debate do not fully understand the complexities of the industry and its role in the overall Health Care system. The analytical tools of economics provide a strong foundation for a better understanding of the dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry, its contribution to Health and Health Care, and its dual and often conflicting priorities of affordability and innovation, as well as the various Private and Public Policy initiatives directed at the sector. Everyone is affected by Big Pharma and the products they produce. At the Drug store, the physician’s office, in front of the television, in everyday conversations, Drugs are a part of our lives. Society shapes our values toward Drugs and Drugs shape society. ("The Pill" and minor tranquilizers are good examples.) And, of course, the way Congress deliberates and Big Pharma responds has a huge impact on how Drugs affect our lives. This book is well-researched on the subject of the pharmaceutical industry, its struggles with Government, and its relationship to the consumer from the early twentieth century until the present. The Dynamic Tension between the three participants – Government, Big Pharma, and the People – is described and explained to lead to an understanding of the controversies that rage today. The author describes how the Government, its many investigatory efforts, and the ultimate legislative results affect the industry and the consequences of their activities are explored in light of their effects on other players, including the patients and consumers who rely on both Government and Big Pharma for their well-being and who find sometimes unexpected consequences while giving special attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and misadventures of less-than-optimal Drug use. Stakeholders are identified with physicians as a major focus, as well as describing the significance of prescriptions as social objects and the processes by which physicians make choices on behalf of their patients. The author ties it all together with how Big Pharma affects and is affected by each of these groups. The author utilizes his 50-plus years’ experience as an academic, practicing pharmacist, and Big Pharma employee to describe the scope of the pharmaceutical industry and how it affects us on a daily basis, concluding with an inside look at Big Pharma and how regulations, marketing, and the press have affected their business, both good and bad.

Squandering Billions is a brutally frank indictment of health spending. The book demonstrates that the absolute power of medical doctors, pharmaceutical companies, health bureaucrats, and hospital administrators enshrines mediocrity at the expense of patients. Mistakes, inefficiency, and malpractice in the Canadian health system may be causing ten times or more unnecessary deaths a year than the toll from traffic accidents (3,000) and crime (500). Some acute care hospitals seem to have become disease factories. Why do health care tragedies not face the scrutiny typically focused upon other accidental and wrongful deaths? Canadian medicare was designed to insure the patient, not the practitioner. Why, then, are medical doctors and hospitals exempted from competition? Evidence shows conclusively that expanded use of community health centres, nurse practitioners, doctors of chiropractic, and others can be more effective and less expensive within their area of expertise. This book goes where official commissions have been afraid to travel.

Abramson combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation, and reveals the tangled web of financial interest at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. Big Pharma funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, and withholds the real data as "corporate secrets." He shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care-- and presents a path toward genuine reform. -- adapted from jacket