AMERICAN MEDICAL AVARICE

Yet another expose of medicine today which perhaps ipso facto encourages one-sidedness and a combativeness justified by the particular grievances cited here. Many of them are familiar, if not overfamlliar (be it Morris Fishbein or Thalidomide), although Ruth Harmer, a popular science researcher, has updated much of the material you know from other consumer-oriented disclosures from Arrowsmith to Seymour Harris. Here are all the bedsores on the backside of the profession and its affiliates: the AMA suppressing everything except the tobacco industry; the venal doctors who benefit from Medicare and Medicaid--one Kentucky practitioner taking in $130,750; the particularly poor quality of care in the low-fee areas; the gratuitous surgical procedures; the experimentation on human guinea pigs; malpractice--with Nizer and Belli appearing as knights in white; the profiteering hospitals, nursing homes, drug industry--the second biggest after what is (or was) the first, oil; off and on. Hope is appended at the end--in the form of group practices as old as Kaiser-Permanente and HIP, and newer ones such as the Puget Sound Cooperative--with more help to come via patient education, paramedical personnel, etc. But like the industry's overkill, can all this be acceptable to an audience whose hand is held weekly by Robert Young and Chad Everett?