Pharmageddon

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David Healy. Pharmageddon

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David Healy

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles

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All of these issues come to a focus in chapter 7 in a description of a patient injured by treatment. Here we see at its clearest the divide between what medicine at its best once was and what it risks becoming. On the basis of the “evidence”—the published reports of controlled trials—our doctor may appear to have little rational option but to deny that the prescribed treatment could have caused us any problems. There is no evidence-based approach to determining whether treatments have injured a patient or what to do when it happens. Why ever not?

Avoiding Pharmageddon is not primarily a matter of containing the escalating costs of healthcare—although this is important. It is a matter of restoring the conditions in which doctors can diagnose what is afflicting us and can offer the appropriate care. This kind of care is not something intangible nor something that looks like current efforts to get health professionals to smile more and encourage their patients to have a nice day or other efforts to deliver a “good service.” When it comes to treatment-induced injuries it will increasingly require those whom we entrust with our care to have the “right stuff.”

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