title: American medical culture and the health care crisis.
abstract: The health care crisis is easily defined as a progressive and massive rise in costs coupled with a failure of the system to provide care to a large minority of the population (37 million). Multiple remedies have been proposed, none of which confronts the core problem. This crisis has been largely produced by the American medical culture--how our physicians practice, what they do to and order for patients. Clearly, medical culture in other Western democracies is different, yielding better overall health care at a lower cost. A brief analysis of any of the sectors of medicine or surgery reveals the overabundance of clinical interventions that take place. The solution will require a major reduction in clinical interventions so many of which are questionable, useless, or even harmful.
authors.affiliation: Atlantic Hematology/Oncology Group, Absecon, NJ.
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Linsk
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D017048:Health Care Costs; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians'; D012962:Sociology, Medical; D014481:United States