Publisher's Synopsis
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
The root cause of America's health care crisis is that health care is not about you. Health care is not designed to help you enjoy good health. It is designed to help doctors take action: write prescriptions, perform surgery, etc. That focus hurts you in two ways:
-First, those actions are likely to damage you nearly as often as they help you because of side effects, complications, and other problems with care delivery. For example, hospital ICUs (Intensive Care Units) have a remarkable number of characteristics in common with prison camps for terrorist suspects. People die needless deaths as a result.
-Second, the focus on actions the doctor takes crowds out actions you could take that would often get you better outcomes. 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 first needs to embrace a new purpose: to enable people to lead the lives they want. Three further changes are necessary:
-The first is a social revolution akin to freeing the slaves or granting women the right to vote. With this revolution, the health care system will no longer treat the people it serves as if they were second-class citizens whose intelligence, values, priorities, and needs can safely be ignored while others call the shots.
-The second is more realistic expectations about what health care can deliver.
-The third is management of health care as a process -- connecting the dots among actions that are uncoordinated today.
Killer Cure provides a tool kit to help you safeguard your life until these changes take place. Before closing, the book makes surprising predictions concerning a future in which health care is about you. At the end of Killer Cure is a Readers' Discussion Guide. It is offered to aid you in thinking about and discussing both the book and your own health care experiences.
