Introduction

I named this blog "Patient Power" because:

                1) I’m discouraged about how expensive health care is in the United States;

                2) I’m angry that so much money is spent on health care that’s clearly inadequate;

                3) I’m worried that at all levels of government our elected representatives seem to have no clue about how to control health care costs except in ways that would make health care even worse for most of us;

         and 4) I hope that by transferring to you my knowledge about how the health care system operates in the United States, you will be able not only to make more informed and better decisions about your own health care and the health care of your family and friends, but also about what must be changed so that we all can have better healthcare at lower costs.

 In later postings, I’ll be writing about (not necessarily in the following order):

                1) Conflicts of interest, what they are and how they influence the behavior of doctors, our health and the costs of medical care;

                2) The fallacy of small doses and what it means for your health;

                3) What scientists now believe about how solid cancers develop and what that means about current and possible future methods of cancer detection;

                4) The controversy over the effectiveness of mammograms, including computer aided detection, and breast self-examination;

                5) The possible demise of the large pharmaceutical companies (aka “Big Pharma”), how it came about and what it means for the development of “individualized medicine;”

                6) Large drug trials, why they evolved, their costs, what their results mean, possible alternatives and the roles played by doctors;

                7) The importance of generic drug manufacturers;

         And 8) how the Food and Drug Administration makes its decisions and what seems to influence the decisions it does make.

Finally, in terms of evaluating my postings I think it’s important to know four things about me:

                1) I’ve been living with active breast cancer for the past fifteen years. I learned most of what I know about the practice of medicine in the United States during my quest to determine what treatments would be best for me;

                2) I’m a clinical and an experimental psychologist. My training included learning how to design and statistically analyze experiments involving human participants---training that has proved to be valuable for understanding and evaluating experiments in medicine since they, too, use human participants;

                3) my politics are progressive.  I believe social, political, and economic reform should come through the state.  However, I also believe progressivism only works well in a democracy when the electorate is able to make informed decisions.

         And 4) most of the examples I use will be coming from the two areas of health care I know the most about: breast cancer and psychology/psychiatry.