Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care

The author of the highly acclaimed Overdiagnosed describes seven widespread assumptions that encourage excessive, often ineffective, and sometimes harmful medical care.
 
To maintain a healthy lifestyle, the US Department of Health and Human Services advises the public to ?eat smart, exercise regularly, and get routine health screenings.?  And that is absolutely correct?except for the checkup part. The American public has been sold the idea that seeking medical care is one of the most important steps to maintaining wellness. Surprisingly, medical care is not, in fact, well correlated with good health. The major determinants of health exist outside individual medical care. 
 
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch pushes against established wisdom and suggests that medical care may be too aggressive. Drawing on his twenty-five years of medical practice and research, Dr. Welch explains that excessive medical care is often powered by economics and lawyers. But American medical care would not exist in this state if the general public did not harbor powerful assumptions about the value of tests and treatments?a number of which are just plain wrong.