Killer Cure Why Health Care is the Second Leading Cause of Death in America and How to Ensure That It Not Yours (Audible Audio Edition) Elizabeth L Bewley Hudson Audio Publishing Books
Download As PDF : Killer Cure Why Health Care is the Second Leading Cause of Death in America and How to Ensure That It Not Yours (Audible Audio Edition) Elizabeth L Bewley Hudson Audio Publishing Books
Killer Cure will change forever how you think about your health and health care. Leaving conventional wisdom in the dust, Killer Cure reveals startling and unforgettable insights
- Why health care in America accidentally kills 12,000 people each week even though every doctor and nurse you know is terrific.
- Why health care's hidden assumptions about you are almost certain to damage your health and what you can do about it.
- Why health care's focus on solving yesterday's problems may reduce life expectancy in the U.S. by as much as five years.
- Why you might want to become CEO of your own health and health care and how to go about it.
Actions taken by well-meaning doctors can hurt you in dozens of ways. For example
- Side effects and complications of treatments they give are very common. For instance, 17-19 million people a year land in the emergency room due to side effects of medicines they take.
- The focus on actions the doctor takes crowds out actions you could take that would often get you better results. For example, more than 100,000 people a year get a foot or leg amputated instead of learning simple ways to prevent foot infections in the first place.
To get better results, the health care system needs to embrace a new purpose. This audio book will open your eyes and empower you to take charge of your health.
Killer Cure Why Health Care is the Second Leading Cause of Death in America and How to Ensure That It Not Yours (Audible Audio Edition) Elizabeth L Bewley Hudson Audio Publishing Books
I like ambitious books, and ambitious authors.And in "Killer Cure," Elizabeth Bewley more than meets both criteria: with the power of her pen (well, laptop) she's setting out to do nothing less than revolutionize the U.S. Health care system. And by golly, she just might do it.
But wait -- isn't she late to the party? Isn't changing health care what Americans just spent most of a year in overheated debate about? That, and a tortuous, ugly congressional process which finally disgorged a new law. Surely somewhere in its 2000-pages of mostly impenetrable (and quite possibly irrelevant) verbiage, there was something to do with changing health care, yes? And doesn't this mean that Bewley has missed the boat?
Well, actually no she hasn't. You see, that humiliating spectacle we recently endured was not so much about health care: rather, it was about who's going to pay for health care, and how.
These are important questions, true-- but we shall not rehash them here. We won't, because for one thing this reviewer is still heartily sick of the whole disgraceful mess; but more importantly because thankfully, that's NOT what Ms. Bewley's landmark book is about.
But what else can Bewley possibly have to say about health care?
Lots. To get at her message, consider this parable:
Your young child is desperately ill, and the doctor says only a special newserum can save her. He writes the prescription, and you rush to the hospital pharmacist, who informs you that the special serum will cost $1000.
(Here we SKIP the part about whether you pay the thousand dollars, or someone else does, because, dear reader, that's not the point, as you will see in a moment.)
You get the special serum and a nurse pours out the dose. Your child swallows it . . . and almost immediately goes into convulsions and cardiac arrest.
Fortunately, you hadn't even left the hospital parking lot yet, so after rushing back to the ER, your child is saved in the very last nick of time.
But saved from what?
This is where Ms. Bewley and "Killer Cure" come in. As her book makes chillingly clear, there is a wide range of possible answers, among them:
-the doctor mis-wrote the prescription;
-the pharmacist mis-read it.
-the nurse mis-administered it.
-your child was allergic to the serum, or one of its ingredients.
-Or any one of several more arcane, but just as potentially fatal errors.
This parable is fiction. But as "Killer Cure" shows in irrefutable, horrifying detail how our medical system, while saving many, kills or maims other real people, every day, by the thousands. In even the top-rated hospitals and clinics.
Ms. Bewley was vice president of a respected health care company, with an Ivy League MBA and an eagle eye for management problems and their remedies. So from the systems angle, when it comes to health care she knows her chops.
But "Killer Cure" is not a B-school academic treatise. That's because the author has also been a patient, with long personal experience of the health care system. Several times, as she describes, it saved her life. But just as many times it almost killed her, or subjected her to months of needless suffering, as it has millions of others.
Thus her book is deeply felt as well as solidly researched. Yet Bewley's ordeals are not retold for sympathy, nor is her expertise merely flaunted. Both combine with passion and are deployed toward the larger goal, the book's big ambition, which is changing the system. Bewley believes modern health care can and must change, so that its dangers are drastically diminished and its benefits greatly increased. (Such change, by the way, would also save enormous amounts of money for whoever pays for it--but I said we wouldn't go there, so forget I said that. Or at least save it for later.)
How can that revolution happen? It's beyond the scope of a mere review to adequately summarize her detailed and meticulous analysis of the multitude of ways failure and harm are almost built in, such that careful surveys convincingly show that fully half of the medical services we receive are useless, or harmful.
Nor for that matter is it easy to reel off a Top Ten list of changes to fix this unholy mess- but that's because there are many such lists here; Bewleydoes not skimp on specifics for tackling problems with doctors, hospitals, diagnoses, surgery, drugs, medical records, and more. And she is generous with references to websites and other outside resources for additional ammunition.
Still, amid the welter of detail, there is a guiding concept in play, simple yet profoundly radical (like most genuinely revolutionary ideas).
It is this: the purpose of health should be to help us (I.e., YOU, dear reader, and yes, even me) to lead the kind of lives we want to live.
If this initially sounds like a truism, friend, it is not. Putting people (aka "patients", "clients," "subjects", and even more impersonal terms) and our well-being as WE define it at the center of the health care system would indeed require turning the system upside down and inside out - regardless of who pays for it, BTW.
As Bewley makes relentlessly clear, with solid data backup, today almost everything else besides us is closer to what health care is about: it's more about the convenience and preferences of doctors and hospitals; it's about the delivery of major, costly interventions and treatments rather than vastly cheaper (and boringly routine) prevention; it's more about esoteric terminology understandable only within the mystic medical guilds than plain explanations of symptoms, options, complications and options for these being "treated"; it's about routinely withholding vital information and records, rather than full and transparent disclosure; and it's too often about the profits to be made at every stage. There's more, much more.
But turning the mantra of "making me (and thee) the CEOs of our own health care" is not magic or easy. Fortunately, Bewley breaks the process down into discrete, accessible phases, applicable to all the main points in the process, from arranging an appointment to preparing for major surgery. Plenty of clear thought has gone into this, but there's no magical thinking shortcuts, thank heaven.
The one thing missing from these very practical recipes in my view is a more pronounced shift from individual to group action. Perhaps that's the basis for a second book: how to turn individual centered health care from a personal survival plan (which is absolutely needed, don't get me wrong), into a mass movement demanding major change from huge, entrenched and fiercely self-protective status quo institutions.
I look forward to that future work. In the meantime, "Killer Cure" remains a landmark book, full of the kind of informed, determined, public-spirited insights and resources that set the truly superior books apart from the merely useful.
It's too bad that many readers may delay coming to "Killer Cure" out of fear or a habit of avoidance of the subjects. Such reactions are understandable: this is life-and-death stuff, that strikes close to home - no, right IN our homes, and the most intimate spaces in them, our bodies (and souls too) .
But you know what such avoidance is like? It's like playing russian roulette, with real bullets.
Only with a difference: you have better survival odds with russian roulette.
Change the game: get this book.
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Killer Cure Why Health Care is the Second Leading Cause of Death in America and How to Ensure That It Not Yours (Audible Audio Edition) Elizabeth L Bewley Hudson Audio Publishing Books Reviews
An amazing book for a number of reasons. It is extremely well-researched and presents a reality that has to be taken seriously...and that reality is very, very scary. It is clear, logical, well-organized, and persuasive. It doesn't whine about how many problems there are and why someone doesn't do something about them, but rather explains the dangerous shortcomings of medical care and presents the steps we all should take to best guide and control the ongoing process of getting and staying well. Buy it. Read it. Get copies for friends and tell them to read it.
I had a humiliating and demoralizing experience a few years ago at a hospital where I was treated like a sub human life form and all informed consent laws were broken. It was so bad that I now suffer from PTSD. I have read everything I can about the medical field in a vain attempt to find out exactly why I was treated with such disdain. I ran across a reference to this book and I am glad I did.
In an entertaining and candid way, this author reveals just why patients are being treated without regard for our rights and she gets right to the heart of this pervasive attitude. Lest you think that it's dry reading, it isn't. It's a very easy read, I finished in 3 hours. I think everybody who is getting older, contemplating any kind of medical procedure or plans to visit a medical professional at any time in their life (everybody) should read this book. Forewarned is forearmed as they say.
For medical personnel, you might like to read this book as well. Get a glimpse of how we patients are starting to view you with suspicion and why. It may open your eyes about your own behavior and/or your brethren's! This book is non confrontational, but it has lots about attitude from medical providers and I think that medical folks would get a lot out of it. Maybe they would see themselves in parts of the book and take steps to rein in the attitude the author describes. There's nothing like seeing your own behavior patterns written down to bring a revelation and hopefully change.
Elizabeth Bewley's Killer Cure is a considerable achievement -- not only for its marvelous research (500 endnotes!), clear writing and organization, and advocacy for the consumer/reader -- but also for its focus on solutions. After detailing the harm that can occur to patients in the current system with numerous examples, Bewley outlines ways that consumers can become the CEOs of their own health care. Getting the process right in both areas is critical, but consumers must be more proactive in their approach being more responsible for illness prevention, stronger and clearer in discussion with medical personnel, and more on top of treatment to ensure it is efficacious. In the current debate on health care, Killer Cure is a signal achievement, that should be widely read and followed.
I like ambitious books, and ambitious authors.
And in "Killer Cure," Elizabeth Bewley more than meets both criteria with the power of her pen (well, laptop) she's setting out to do nothing less than revolutionize the U.S. Health care system. And by golly, she just might do it.
But wait -- isn't she late to the party? Isn't changing health care what Americans just spent most of a year in overheated debate about? That, and a tortuous, ugly congressional process which finally disgorged a new law. Surely somewhere in its 2000-pages of mostly impenetrable (and quite possibly irrelevant) verbiage, there was something to do with changing health care, yes? And doesn't this mean that Bewley has missed the boat?
Well, actually no she hasn't. You see, that humiliating spectacle we recently endured was not so much about health care rather, it was about who's going to pay for health care, and how.
These are important questions, true-- but we shall not rehash them here. We won't, because for one thing this reviewer is still heartily sick of the whole disgraceful mess; but more importantly because thankfully, that's NOT what Ms. Bewley's landmark book is about.
But what else can Bewley possibly have to say about health care?
Lots. To get at her message, consider this parable
Your young child is desperately ill, and the doctor says only a special newserum can save her. He writes the prescription, and you rush to the hospital pharmacist, who informs you that the special serum will cost $1000.
(Here we SKIP the part about whether you pay the thousand dollars, or someone else does, because, dear reader, that's not the point, as you will see in a moment.)
You get the special serum and a nurse pours out the dose. Your child swallows it . . . and almost immediately goes into convulsions and cardiac arrest.
Fortunately, you hadn't even left the hospital parking lot yet, so after rushing back to the ER, your child is saved in the very last nick of time.
But saved from what?
This is where Ms. Bewley and "Killer Cure" come in. As her book makes chillingly clear, there is a wide range of possible answers, among them
-the doctor mis-wrote the prescription;
-the pharmacist mis-read it.
-the nurse mis-administered it.
-your child was allergic to the serum, or one of its ingredients.
-Or any one of several more arcane, but just as potentially fatal errors.
This parable is fiction. But as "Killer Cure" shows in irrefutable, horrifying detail how our medical system, while saving many, kills or maims other real people, every day, by the thousands. In even the top-rated hospitals and clinics.
Ms. Bewley was vice president of a respected health care company, with an Ivy League MBA and an eagle eye for management problems and their remedies. So from the systems angle, when it comes to health care she knows her chops.
But "Killer Cure" is not a B-school academic treatise. That's because the author has also been a patient, with long personal experience of the health care system. Several times, as she describes, it saved her life. But just as many times it almost killed her, or subjected her to months of needless suffering, as it has millions of others.
Thus her book is deeply felt as well as solidly researched. Yet Bewley's ordeals are not retold for sympathy, nor is her expertise merely flaunted. Both combine with passion and are deployed toward the larger goal, the book's big ambition, which is changing the system. Bewley believes modern health care can and must change, so that its dangers are drastically diminished and its benefits greatly increased. (Such change, by the way, would also save enormous amounts of money for whoever pays for it--but I said we wouldn't go there, so forget I said that. Or at least save it for later.)
How can that revolution happen? It's beyond the scope of a mere review to adequately summarize her detailed and meticulous analysis of the multitude of ways failure and harm are almost built in, such that careful surveys convincingly show that fully half of the medical services we receive are useless, or harmful.
Nor for that matter is it easy to reel off a Top Ten list of changes to fix this unholy mess- but that's because there are many such lists here; Bewleydoes not skimp on specifics for tackling problems with doctors, hospitals, diagnoses, surgery, drugs, medical records, and more. And she is generous with references to websites and other outside resources for additional ammunition.
Still, amid the welter of detail, there is a guiding concept in play, simple yet profoundly radical (like most genuinely revolutionary ideas).
It is this the purpose of health should be to help us (I.e., YOU, dear reader, and yes, even me) to lead the kind of lives we want to live.
If this initially sounds like a truism, friend, it is not. Putting people (aka "patients", "clients," "subjects", and even more impersonal terms) and our well-being as WE define it at the center of the health care system would indeed require turning the system upside down and inside out - regardless of who pays for it, BTW.
As Bewley makes relentlessly clear, with solid data backup, today almost everything else besides us is closer to what health care is about it's more about the convenience and preferences of doctors and hospitals; it's about the delivery of major, costly interventions and treatments rather than vastly cheaper (and boringly routine) prevention; it's more about esoteric terminology understandable only within the mystic medical guilds than plain explanations of symptoms, options, complications and options for these being "treated"; it's about routinely withholding vital information and records, rather than full and transparent disclosure; and it's too often about the profits to be made at every stage. There's more, much more.
But turning the mantra of "making me (and thee) the CEOs of our own health care" is not magic or easy. Fortunately, Bewley breaks the process down into discrete, accessible phases, applicable to all the main points in the process, from arranging an appointment to preparing for major surgery. Plenty of clear thought has gone into this, but there's no magical thinking shortcuts, thank heaven.
The one thing missing from these very practical recipes in my view is a more pronounced shift from individual to group action. Perhaps that's the basis for a second book how to turn individual centered health care from a personal survival plan (which is absolutely needed, don't get me wrong), into a mass movement demanding major change from huge, entrenched and fiercely self-protective status quo institutions.
I look forward to that future work. In the meantime, "Killer Cure" remains a landmark book, full of the kind of informed, determined, public-spirited insights and resources that set the truly superior books apart from the merely useful.
It's too bad that many readers may delay coming to "Killer Cure" out of fear or a habit of avoidance of the subjects. Such reactions are understandable this is life-and-death stuff, that strikes close to home - no, right IN our homes, and the most intimate spaces in them, our bodies (and souls too) .
But you know what such avoidance is like? It's like playing russian roulette, with real bullets.
Only with a difference you have better survival odds with russian roulette.
Change the game get this book.
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