How We Do Harm

It's one thing to read a statistical assessment of overtreatment, and how some "cures" are either ineffective or worse.  It's quite another to read the personal stories of people who underwent such treatment. 

A woman suffered brutal side effects getting HDC-ABMT, only to discover that studies show the treatment doesn't prolong survival.  A few years later she finds the cancer has come back, and at almost the same time she loses her insurance for having blown the life time benefit max.

A 70 year old man gets free prostate cancer screening at the mall, finds an abnormality and gets "treated."  He spends his remaining years incontinent and with a colostomy bag before dying of a UTI.

Even as we spend vast sums on overtreatment we have people suffering from undertreatment, such as an uninsured woman who walked into an ER with a body part in a bag after suffering auto-mastectomy from advanced, untreated breast cancer.

Health care reform is going to have its ups and downs.  But if you ever need a reminder about why the pre-ACA system was unacceptable, why it was a gross moral failure, check out How We Do Harm by Otis Webb Brawley and Paul Goldberg.  In their words, incidents of failure weren't aberrations from the system, failure was the system.