Charles Sutton's List: 610 Medicine and Health

Importance of Open Access publishing.

According to Abramson, Americans are overmedicated and overmedicalized as a result of the commercialization of health care. Falling prey to marketing campaigns, we demand unnecessary and expensive drugs and procedures, believing they constitute the best possible medical care.

From Booklist\n*Starred Review* Any physician knows that the careless mingling of certain medical interventions can lead to unwanted-even fatal-consequences for the patient. That explains why physician-philosopher Elliott decided to pen this cautionary book, exposing example after example of the adverse effects of mixing capitalism with the practice of medicine. It leads, he says, to a situation where there is no true advocate for the patient. Patients have become health-care consumers shopping for "the best medical bargains they can find." In such an atmosphere, neither the pharmaceutical company nor the medical researcher, not even one's own doctor, can be relied upon to place a patient's best interests above profits. Besides the obvious perils inherent when a physician accepts "gifts" from pharmaceutical and medical-equipment salespeople, there are risks when authorities trusted with oversight also have conflicts of interest. Many medical journals depend upon corporate advertising, and clinical-trial oversight committees are populated with people who are on a pharmaceutical company's payroll. Moreover, because medical research has become so proprietary, he notes, no one is sharing basic discoveries, resulting in needless duplication of efforts that can delay or kill advanced scientific developments. Elliott's dim view ought to be a real eye-opener for health-care patients-cum-consumers. --Donna Chavez