We Don’t Have a Health Care System, We Have a Medical-Industrial Complex

From John Abramson, MD/Hillsdale College: “I was in the intensive care unit when a cardiologist came by on rounds. He advocates a wider use of cholesterol-lowering statin medications than I do, and he started to cite the literature about why I should be taking more cholesterol-lowering medicine than I already was. I asked him if he had read the studies underlying that literature, and of course he had. I then asked him if he understood that the endpoint of many of those studies wasn’t really appropriate to determine the benefit of statins, and he acknowledged there was some debate about that. Finally, I asked if he was aware that when peer-reviewed articles are published in medical journals—even the most reputable medical journals—the peer reviewers don’t have access to the actual data from the clinical trials being reviewed. And he answered, somewhat meekly, that yes, he was aware of that.

In other words, he was aware that his recommendation that I increase my use of statin drugs was based entirely on incompletely vetted commercially-sponsored and largely commercially-influenced medical journal articles. This gets to the heart of the problem of the commercial takeover of the medical knowledge that doctors believe in and implement.

. . . Prior to leaving office in 1961, President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about what he called the ‘military-industrial complex.’ I suggest that we now have a medical-industrial complex that is sucking America’s wealth away from the other things that will make us healthier and create better lives for the American people.

Ask yourself, what ought to be the primary goal of American health care? To my mind it is this: to maintain and improve individual and population health most effectively and efficiently. And if that is correct, there are two critical questions we all need to ask: (1) Why are we failing so miserably to achieve this goal? and (2) Why are doctors and other health care professionals willing to go along with this dysfunctional system?”

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