Follies Fallacies In Medicine

The progress of science and the growth of knowledge, claim the authors, depend upon challenging accepted dogma and belief. Their purpose in this book is not to criticize medicine or those who practice it but to advocate the need for criticism in medicine. Doctors, they claim, can discover new ways and improve old ways to ease the human journey from cradle to grave--through rational inquiry, honest admission of ignorance, and by demystifying rituals. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book concerns itself with the key question: how to improve health in a cost effective and politically acceptable way. What makes people healthy? Why are the poor less healthy than the rich? Why do some countries have a better health record than others? An Introduction to Health is divided into four parts comprising the determinants of health, health service planning, health service financing, and controlling costs and securing user-friendly services.

Decisions are influenced by a variety of fallacies and biases that we can learn how to avoid. Critical thinking values, knowledge, and skills, therefore, are integral to evidence-based practice. These emphasize the importance of recognizing ignorance as well as knowledge and the vital role of criticism in discovering how to make better decisions. This book is for clinicians--clinicians who are willing to say "I don't know." Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice, Second Edition is designed to enhance readers' skills in making well-informed, ethical decisions. Making such decisions is no easy task. Decisions are made in uncertain, changing environments with time pressures. Interested parties, such as the pharmaceutical industry, spend millions of dollars to influence decisions made. Drawing on a wide range of related literature, this book describes common pitfalls in clinical reasoning as well as strategies for avoiding them--sometimes called mind-tools. Mental health and allied professionals will come away from this text with knowledge of how classification decisions, a focus on pathology, and reliance on popularity can cause errors. Hazards involved in data collection and team decision making such as groupthink are discussed. Part 1 provides an overview of the context in which clinicians make decisions. Part 2 describes common sources of error. Part 3 describes decision aids including the process of evidence-based practice. Part 4 describes the application of related content to different helping phases including assessment, intervention, and evaluation. Part 5 suggests obstacles to making well-informed decisions and how to encourage lifelong learning. This new Second Edition has been completely updated with expanded coverage on: Evidence-based practice Screening issues and practice errors Lifelong learning Problem solving Decision making An interactive, dynamic book filled with insightful examples, useful lists and guidelines, and exercises geared to encourage critical thinking, Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice, Second Edition provides an essential resource for helping professionals and students.

In the years following World War II, medicine won major battles against smallpox, diphtheria, and polio. In the same period it also produced treatments to control the progress of Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, and schizophrenia. It made realities of open-heart surgery, organ transplants, test-tube babies. Unquestionably, the medical accomplishments of the postwar years stand at the forefront of human endeavor, yet progress in recent decades has slowed nearly to a halt. In this judicious examination of medicine in our times, which has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, medical doctor and columnist James Le Fanu both surveys the glories of medicine in the postwar years and analyzes the factors that for the past twenty-five years have increasingly widened the gulf between achievement and advancement: the social theories of medicine, ethical issues, and political debates over health care that have hobbled the development of vaccines and discovery of new “miracle” cures. While fully demonstrating the extraordinary progress effected by medical research in the latter half of the twentieth century, Le Fanu also identifies the perils that confront medicine in the twenty-first. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs add to what the Los Angeles Times cited as “a sobering, contrarian challenge” to the “nostrum of medicine as a never-ending font of ‘miracle cures’.” “[From] a respected science writer ... important information that ... has been overlooked or ignored by many physicians.”—New Republic “Provocative and engrossing and informative.”—Houston Chronicle “Marvelously written, meticulously researched ... one of the most thought-provoking and important works to appear in recent years.”—Choice