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Healthcare or Health Harm?
A commentary by two doctors in the current Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that it's time to differentiate between healthcare and health harm. Although the data are imprecise, the authors suggest the benefits delivered by US healthcare may not outweigh the aggregate harm imparted.
In other words, you can never have too much health. Yet your health can be harmed by the overuse of medicine or by the costs of funding healthcare.
How does that work? First there's direct harm from healthcare, including adverse physical and emotional effects from all the usual stuff associated with everything from excessive use to misdiagnoses to conflicting treatments.
Second, the authors suggest, there's indirect harm. This comes from the fact that healthcare costs increasingly divert resources from education, jobs, and environmental quality—all important determinants of your health.
Healthcare's objective should be to improve health, they say. Yet its primary emphasis has been on producing services. And fee-for-service payments tend to encourage the use of more treatments, new technologies, and extra testing. These additional services and their costs can actually harm health.
The fix? To begin with, study health harm to improve healthcare. Specifically, we need to understand the tradeoffs involved in healthcare interventions and expenditures in order to guide healthcare reform efforts. While more people need access to healthcare, that's not enough. Healthcare reform needs to improve how medicine is practiced: centering it on patients, organizing it around primary care, and curbing health harm, including excessive healthcare use and spending.
How about this Rx: Fewer drugs, cleaner water, better air, healthful food, more exercise, education, jobs…
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Health Enemy No.1: Climate Change
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Global Warming and Your Kids' Health
LiveScience reports on a study from Australia published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research showing that a warming climate is bad for kids' health. Lawrence Lam, a pediatrics lecturer at Sydney University, compared emergency room visits for kids under age six to climate data, finding that higher temps outside correlated to more children with fevers and gastroenteritis visiting the ER. The possible...
Health Harm? I guess so!
tagged as:- result
I recently lost a friend who kept an awful job up to two months before she died of bone cancer. It was bad enough that she struggled in agony to drive to the job and get through the day doing enough to keep from being fired, but they changed Insurance Providers every year, and sometimes her doctor or medication was covered and sometimes not, and then it was a huge fight to keep any successful regimen, or bring the new doctor up to speed, or even find one who was close or gave a damn.
Only one of a long list of horror stories. Only a system focused on Patients needs will work, and only a Single Payer system can bring that focus, and dispense with the plague of Bureaucrats who's only job is to deny care.
Sorry to hear about your
Sorry to hear about your friend. The last people who should have to deal with the horrors of our current healthcare system, make that healthcare chaos, are those already sick. We need a system that works effortlessly WHEN you're sick.
Julia Whitty, Environmental Correspondent, Mother Jones
How can any entity put
How can any entity put patients' needs first in a for-profit healthcare system that seems to be run by the powerful healthcare mobs/lobbies, who's only concern is the bottom line?