★★★★★ 4
Fabulous book but seems a little biased
Format: Hardcover
I read a lot on the healthcare system and also have a biology PhD and a healthcare-related career, so I read 'How We Do Harm' with real interest and found that I tremendously enjoyed it, largely due to its distinctive and refreshing down-to-earth, no-holds-barred, friend-of-the-people style attack on many different sacred cows of the healthcare system. He exposes ignorance, shysterism, laziness and other commonplace human failings AMONG HIS FELLOW PHYSICIANS, where these everyday human foibles have an enormous impact on the life and death and quality of life of the patients treated by them. And he is not just any physician, he is the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the American Cancer Society. It reads like the system has turned on itself. This is a 'People's History' of the current healthcare system. The language is carefully unacademic and the cases he chooses are heart-wringing for the most part. I think there is much to learn from the diverse cases he selects, and he goes after problems originating with patients and their families as well as doctors and the system. If each of the problems that Dr. Brawley characterizes were systematically addressed, we would have a somewhat better and MUCH cheaper system - I think essentially a Canadian system, even if there were multiple payors. Once everyone followed the same rules and there was little role for physician discretion, and little role for new therapies until massive clinical studies achieved definitive conclusive results, inefficiencies in the system would be dramatically reduced, and many patients would receive better care.
The problem with this objective, IMHO, is that the heterogeneity of cancer and the rate of advance in this particular field would not be well-served by a system where no new therapies were paid for until they had achieved p values of <0.05 in clinical trials IN THE PRECISE PATIENT POPULATION of the patient who needs treatment. Some cancers are so rare that this would never happen. In other cases, new research information evolves in small case series that wouldn't meet Dr. Brawley's standards but would provide vital information for selection of therapy.
All-in-all, Dr. Brawley appears overly philosophically committed to the concept of clinical certainty, iron-clad treatment paradigms, and saving the system money. I'm all for saving the system money, but Dr. Brawley goes after cancer screening with the dedication of a hero confronting his nemesis. He barely acknowledges the potential for good to come from screening. For example, he is dismissive of the value provided by lung cancer screening, in spite of a roughly 50,000 patient randomized controlled study that showed a 20% reduction in cancer mortality in heavy smokers who received screening! This was without even specifying how these patients were treated - the 20% reduction in the leading cause of cancer mortality was simply from looking for a spot on the lung, and then letting the doctor and patient decide what treatment to pursue. I see that as a tremendous breakthrough. Dr. Brawley sees it as a roughly even set of risks and benefits that the system presumably should hesitate to fund. (Updated August 2013 to note that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has now issued a strong recommendation for CT screening of heavy smokers for early detection of lung cancer, based primarily on the data above. "As many as 20,000 deaths a year could be prevented by screening", according to Michael LeFevre, MD, co-vice chair of the task force).
The book is well worth reading; but there are other intelligent, reasonable viewpoints on the burning thesis presented by this book, and one unfortunately comes away with the impression that Dr. Brawley would not acknowledge this. I found myself comforted by the fact that other checks and balances in the system will limit Dr. Brawley's impact on cancer treatment paradigms, even with his role at the ACS.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2012


