Medical Mistakes
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/09/health/medical-mistakes/index.html
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/25798
http://www.oddee.com/item_96576.aspx
False Research Results and Useless Expensive Treatments
http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=53345
From the article:
Prompted by soaring health-care costs and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools, more and more medical treatments are taking their turn under the microscope. One driving force is John P.A. Ioannidis, chief of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. He works with colleagues around the globe to scrutinize treatments that account for huge chunks of the health- care tab but that are, he says, virtually worthless and sometimes harmful. Ioannidis says financial influence is one of several factors that can, deliberately or unintentionally, skew study design and methodology and undermine the validity of published research findings. His extensive publications pointing out these problems are reverberating throughout the scientific community—and threaten entire medical specialties that have organized themselves around big-ticket, but low-value, interventions.
Other links about false research results:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/02/07/most-published-research-results-are-false/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBNeuG10-ac
A controversial book about the problems in medicine:
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Medical-Heretic-Robert-Mendelsohn/dp/0809241315
From a review of the book:
"A hospital is like a war" Here you have it from a doctor who has been there and done that. As he describes the things that go on in a hospital it is amazing that anyone comes out alive. It does not surprise me when there are several people I personally know who have gotten very ill in a hospital from something COMPLETELY unrelated to why they entered. This book needs to be read by all.