|
Live or Die: How the Present Way of American Medicine Could Cost You Your Health, Your Wealth, and Even Your Life and What You Can Do About It Now
by Thomas H. Ainsworth
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co (1983-05)
ISBN: 0025006401
EAN: 9780025006409
Dewey Decimal #: 362.10973
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 272 pages
SKU: 6096-015
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Tight spine, clean pages.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Live or Die
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-03-08
This important book is both a timely and revealing account of the way medicine is practiced in the United States and a consumer guide to gaining control over your health and well-being.
The American Medical Establishment is now the nation's second largest industry, generating almost 10% of the gross national product. In 1981 Americans spent a staggering $287 billion on health care, yet only 4 percent of that amount was paid for medical prevention - at a time when medical science has the capability to prevent half of all known illnesses, including heart disease, lubng cancer and stroke.
In his eye-opening study, American physician Thomas H. Ainsworth brings these troubling statistics to life. Seldom has the Medical Establishment, which Dr. Ainsworth describes as a space-age dinosaur, been examined so frankly.
The first part of Live or Die offers an insiders view of the history, politics, and socioeconomics of the Medical Establishment. Dr. Ainsworth shows where its most serious problems lie and makes it clear, using many specific examples, why rapidly escalating costs, resricted access to adequate family care, overspecialization, and technological overkill could bring the world's best health care system to its knees. Stripping the profession of its awe-inspiring mystique, he exposes every aspect of organized medicine, from the AMA lobby to the surgical suite, from hospitals and health insurance to research institutes. Dr. Ainsworth is openly critical of such prevalent abuses as unnnecessary bypass surgery and Caesarean sections, and the for profit, proprietary business of kidney dialysis.
The second part of this book explains how you, the medical consumer, can make the present system more responsive to your needs and help transform the system for the future. It provides a wealth of encouraging information on how you and your physician can identify you own health hazards and prevent disease by risk-factor intervention. These tools are inexpensive and easy to use. Were they employed by the medical profession at large, America's annual health-care bill could be slashed by $100 billion! Finally' Live or Die is an invaluable resource. It may also become - quite literally - a book you cannot afford to live without.
--- from book's dustjacket
|
|
|
|
|