A first-hand account by one of the doctors who exposed the truth at National Women's Hospital. Jones sets the record straight with his personal story: a story of the unnecessary suffering of countless women, a story of professional arrogance and misplaced loyalties, and a story of doctors in denial of the truth.

Doctors in Denial examines the relationship between the Canadian medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry, and explains how doctors have become dependents of the drug companies instead of champions of patients' health. Big Pharma plays a role in every aspect of doctors' work. These giant, wealthy multinationals influence how medical students are trained and receive information, how research is done in hospitals and universities, what is published in leading medical journals, what drugs are approved, and what patients expect when they go into their doctors' offices. But almost all doctors deny the influence and control the drug companies exert. In this book Dr. Lexchin urges the medical profession to make the changes needed to give priority to protecting and promoting patients' health and benefitting society, rather than enabling Big Pharma to dominate health care while raking in billions in profits from citizens and governments.

Deep disorder pervades medical practice. Disguised in euphemisms like "clinical judgment" and "evidence-based medicine," disorder exists because medical practice lacks a true system of care. The missing system has two core elements: standards of care for managing clinical information, and electronic information tools designed to implement those standards. Electronic information tools are now widely discussed, but the necessary standards of care are still widely ignored. Because these two elements are external to the physician's mind, they address a root cause of disorder: dependence on the internal capacities of autonomous physicians-their personal knowledge, intellect, habits and judgment. In this dependence on the limited, idiosyncratic capacities of individuals, medical practice lags centuries behind the domains of science and commerce. Breaking that dependence is the subject of this book.Going back 400 years to the philosophy of Francis Bacon, and examining parallel ideas from 20th Century thinkers, this book illuminates the origin of medicine's disorder. The analysis is more than theoretical. It grew out of decades of development and clinical experience in finding a new approach to medical practice. Designed to create order and transparency, this new approach involves not only standards and tools but also institutional changes essential to building a true system of care. In the current non-system, physicians bear impossible burdens of performance, other practitioners are barred from sharing those burdens, patients do not participate effectively in their own care, the U.S. spends $2.5 trillion annually without clinical accounting standards, third parties manipulate the situation for their own advantage, and none of the stakeholders are accountable for their own behaviors.This book offers a clear blueprint for building a better system of care, a system that patients, practitioners and third parties could trust. A better system could make health care a source of hope for our economic future, rather than its greatest threat.

A primary care doctor is skeptical of his patient’s concerns. A hospital nurse or intern is unaware of a drug’s potential side effects. A physician makes the most “common” diagnosis while overlooking the signs of a rarer and more serious illness, and the patient doesn’t see the necessary specialist until it’s too late. A pharmacist dispenses the wrong drug and a patient dies as a result. Sadly, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Each year, 6.1 million Americans are harmed by diagnostic mistakes, drug disasters, and medical treatments. A decade ago, the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 98,000 people died in hospitals each year from preventable medical errors. And new research from the University of Utah, HealthGrades of Denver, and elsewhere suggests the toll is much higher. Patient advocates and bestselling authors Joe and Teresa Graedon came face-to-face with the tragic consequences of doctors’ screwups when Joe’s mother died in Duke Hospital—one of the best in the world—due to a disastrous series of entirely preventable errors. In Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them, the Graedons expose the most common medical mistakes, from doctor’s offices and hospitals to the pharmacy counters and nursing homes. Patients across the country shared their riveting horror stories, and doctors recounted the disastrous—and sometimes deadly—consequences of their colleagues’ oversights and errors. While many patients feel vulnerable and dependent on their health care providers, this book is a startling wake-up call to how wrong doctors can be. The good news is that we can protect ourselves, and our loved ones, by being educated and vigilant medical consumers. The Graedons give patients the specific, practical steps they need to take to ensure their safety: the questions to ask a specialist before getting a final diagnosis, tips for promoting good communication with your doctor, presurgery checklists, how to avoid deadly drug interactions, and much more. Whether you’re sick or healthy, young or old, a parent of a young child, or caring for an elderly loved one, Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them is an eye-opening look at the medical mistakes that can truly affect any of us—and an empowering guide that explains what we can do about it.

You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you. Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need? With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize—for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease. Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost. “A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

Often when death is the inevitable and impending outcome of a health diagnosis, doctors are reluctant to discuss alternatives to treatment, feeding into a culture of denial that can result in expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary over treatment that may or may not extend life but almost always damages the quality of life. Here, a seasoned doctor and researcher looks at the ways in which we are accustomed to treating illness at all costs, even at the expense of the quality of a patient’s life. He considers our culture of denial, the medical profession’s role in over treating patients and end of life care, and the patient’s options and role in these decisions. The goal is to help patients and families make informed decisions that may help the seriously ill live better with their illnesses. This profoundly empowering book will help people make informed decisions about their lives and medical care, especially those who have a life-threatening or life-changing illness themselves or have a family member living with one. Incorporating specific questions for patients to ask their doctors and discuss with their families, the book provides an analysis of various forces that influence our decision-making. The book also examines the professional, psychological, economic, and social pressures that influence physicians treating seriously ill patients, including those that lead doctors to recommend treatments that may be futile. The book concludes with resources that seriously ill patients and their families can call upon to give them support and assist with the logistical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of end-of-life care.

“[A] powerful account of the sexism cooked into medical care ... will motivate readers to advocate for themselves.”—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review A groundbreaking and feminist work of investigative reporting: Explains why women experience healthcare differently than men Shares the author’s journey of fighting for an endometriosis diagnosis In Pain and Prejudice, acclaimed investigative reporter Gabrielle Jackson takes readers behind the scenes of doctor’s offices, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs to show that—at nearly every level of healthcare—men’s health claims are treated as default, whereas women’s are often viewed as a-typical, exaggerated, and even completely fabricated. The impacts of this bias? Women are losing time, money, and their lives trying to navigate a healthcare system designed for men. Almost all medical research today is performed on men or male mice, making most treatments tailored to male bodies only. Even conditions that are overwhelmingly more common in women, such as chronic pain, are researched on mostly male bodies. Doctors and researchers who do specialize in women’s healthcare are penalized financially, as procedures performed on men pay higher. Meanwhile, women are reporting feeling ignored and dismissed at their doctor’s offices on a regular basis. Jackson interweaves these and more stunning revelations in the book with her own story of suffering from endometriosis, a condition that affects up to 20% of American women but is poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed. She also includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue on the ways that Covid-19 are impacting women in different and sometimes more long-lasting ways than men. A rich combination of journalism and personal narrative, Pain and Prejudice reveals a dangerously flawed system and offers solutions for a safer, more equitable future.