Rosemary Gibson is senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where for thirteen years she has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants aimed at improving end-of-life care. Janardan Prasad Singh is an economist at the World Bank and has written extensively on health care, social policy, and economic development. The authors have also collaborated on Wall of Silence, a book of narratives about medical error.
Through a series of compelling stories in their readable book,
Gibson and Singh show the effect of too much doctoring, including
some stories that show assertive patients rejecting treatments they
believed to be unnecessary.
*Health Affairs*
Consumer oriented and clearly written, this should prove useful as
people increasingly take a more critical look at what health-care
providers recommend.
*Library Journal*
The Treatment Trap is beautifully written—clear and direct, filled
with facts bookended by stories of people caught and harmed by the
system and the doctors they had trusted completely....The Treatment
Trap is the canary in the mine for the medical profession.
*Oncology Times*
The Treatment Trap" is co-authored by Rosemary Gibson, who long
worked at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on health-care quality
and safety issues, and by Janardan Prad Singh, an economist at the
World Bank whose previous work has concentrated on the same area.
Together, they have produced a well-told, well-researched catalog
of horrors about people killed and maimed by tests and operations
they didn't need.
Theirs is not the first popular account of the dangers of
over-treatment, but it updates a story that cannot be told often
enough, and in a way that can serve as a useful consumer guide to
anyone contemplating a course of treatment. Good to know, for
example, that one-third of all heart bypass surgeries are
unnecessary or that there is virtually no evidence to support
surgery for back pain. The authors are particularly effective in
pointing out that much going on in the name of prevention and
diagnosis is wasteful or harmful. ....The secrets we keep in health
care, whether it's the results of drug company tests that failed or
all the data contained in lost and scattered paper medical records,
come at a great cost to medical progress.
*The Washington Post*
This book exposes medical hucksterism and debunks the myth that
more is better.... Recommended.
*CHOICE*
Here’s a book that might do more than health reform to get readers
to question doctors’ recommendations for medical procedures. Gibson
and Singh, who together broached the subject earlier in Wall of
Silence, offer tales of patients who have been
horrifically—sometimes fatally—ill-advised by doctors to have
unnecessary medical procedures with unexpected complications. One
man went for knee replacement surgery to ease his aching legs and
died of a heart attack; a fireman was subjected to unnecessary
heart bypass surgery; and a South Carolina teen died from
complications of an unsafe but slickly marketed new procedure for a
mild case of a condition called funnel chest. These cases are
numerous and shocking. The solutions are less obvious. The authors
cite experts who say the problem is systemic—doctors get paid for
procedures—but suggest that patients can protect themselves by
becoming informed consumers. These warnings are a welcome guide in
a process that too often depends on a patient’s leap of faith.
*Publishers Weekly*
Grants program director Gibson and World Bank economist Singh
present a riveting case against the “more” culture of American
medicine that is a natural development of the ideology that fueled
the nation’s settlement and frontier expansion but that, applied to
health care, facilitates alarming results. When emphasis shifts
from scientifically weighing risk against patients’ potential
medical benefit to maximizing health-care professionals’ profits,
consumers pay more for often unnecessary tests, treatments, and
procedures, and they and the system suffer. Medical overuse occurs
because it can. Doctors’ autonomy within “a self-sealed system”
keeps scrutiny at bay, leading to the overemphasis of dire
prognoses and the domino effects of extra testing despite the
increased likelihood of false positives and NIH warnings about the
carcinogenicity of X-rays. And the affects of medical overuse for
the sake of money aren’t only physical. A disproportionately
frightening diagnosis “changes your view of your body and your
life,” one research scientist says. Including an appendix of
“Twenty Smart Ways to Protect Yourself,” this compelling argument
may attract plenty of attention.
*Booklist*
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