Online More Than Medicine: The Case for Social Investment to Improve America's Health For Kindle

  • 5 years ago
https://foryou.plasabrick.top/?book=0674975901
[Read] American science produces the best--and most expensive--medical treatments in the world. Yet U.S. citizens lag behind their global peers in life expectancy and quality of life. Robert Kaplan brings together extensive data to make the case that health care priorities in the United States are sorely misplaced. America's medical system is invested in attacking disease, but not in solving the social and behavioral problems that engender disease in the first place. Medicine is important, but many Americans act as though it were all important.The U.S. stakes much of its health funding on the promise of high-tech diagnostics and miracle treatments, while ignoring strong evidence that the most significant pathways to health are nonmedical. Americans spend millions on drugs to treat high cholesterol, for example, which increase life expectancy by six to eight months on average. But they underfund education, which might extend life expectancy by as much as twelve years. Wars on infectious disease have paid off, but clinical trials for chronic conditions--costing billions--rarely confirm that new treatments extend life. By comparison, the National Institutes of Health spend just 3 percent of their budget on research in social and behavioral determinants of health, even though these factors account for 50 percent of premature deaths.America's failure to take prevention seriously costs lives. More than Medicine argues that we need a shake-up in how we invest resources, and it offers a bold new vision for longer, healthier living. For Full

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