DermHelpCentral

America's Bitter Pill (Book Review)

Abigail Zuger’s review thoughtful of Steven Brill’s “America’s Bitter Pill”

“Never sign up for a tour of the sausage factory, not if you want to keep eating sausage…Steven Brill has put together a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American health care circa 2014 — a tour de force inspection of both sausage and factory.

The health business [is] totally awesome till someone goes and gets sick. Mr. Brill’s own perspective took a similar lurch when in the spring of 2014 he underwent repair of an aortic aneurysm, an expensive and complicated procedure. As a patient, he writes, “I was anything but the well-informed, tough consumer with lots of options that a robust free market counts on. I was a puddle.”

…the fatal flaw in market-based medical care: Patients and their relatives simply cannot be savvy shoppers. Their attentions are elsewhere.

Melanoma Overview

In PubMed as of January 2015, there are 99,000 articles about melanoma.  Clearly, no one can master this literature.  There appears to be little consistency in the follow-up of patients with melanoma.  Some oncologists are very aggressive, but this does not appear to be backed by data.

AiM is a group that has put together a good website which provides some guidance.  Most of one's questions can be answered at their site.  [About AiM]