He believes this is because of ignorance, intellectual laziness, even greed on the part of individual doctors who practice substandard medicine; professional medical societies and the pharmaceutical industry; and regulatory bodies that simply are not doing their jobs.
“[N]o incident of failure in American medicine should be dismissed as an aberration,’’ writes Brawley. “Failure is the system, and those of us who are not yet its victims are at high risk of being sucked into its turbines.’’
In “How We Do Harm,’’ Brawley, with assistance from veteran investigative journalist Paul Goldberg, presents a tough-minded, solidly argued indictment of health care in America, backed by solid documentation and illustrated by examples of specific cases (including one involving the cancer treatment of the late US Representative Silvio Conte from Western Massachusetts), some taken from Brawley’s personal experiences as an oncologist.
He describes the hospital he works at as a “950 bed behemoth [which] stands for another form of segregation: poor versus rich, separate but with no pretense to equality.’’ And indeed, while everyone is vulnerable, minorities and the poor are especially so. Brawley notes that people without health insurance or who are insured through Medicaid are 1.6 times more likely to die from cancer within five years of diagnosis than those with private insurance. He also shows that one-quarter of Americans with cancer delay testing or treatment because of cost.
