Demanding Medical Excellence

Demanding Medical Excellence provides an eye-opening view of medicine that focuses on what happens once we reach the doctor's office or hospital. Although few patients realize it, even the best-trained doctors go about their work with an astonishingly shallow base of knowledge about the link between what they do and how it affects health. As many as eight out of ten medical practices have never been scientifically validated. Proven therapies, meanwhile, can take years to make their way into common use, even for deadly problems like heart disease. Often, geography is destiny: how a woman is treated for breast cancer can depend solely on where in the United States she lives. But a convergence of technology and changed financial incentives is finally forcing change. As the economic reality of medical cost containment meets the information age, it has become imperative to critically examine the care we are receiving. This book calls into question many of our assumptions about the mixture of art and science in medicine and lays out the steps we must take today to assure consistently excellent care in the future.

Year

1997

Language

English

Publisher

University Of Chicago Press

Editions

1

Pages

469

ISBN

9780226525884

Data source: Wikidata