The Decapitation of Care: A Short History of the Rise and Fall of Healthcare

Before 1990, we brought our health problems to doctors and got “care”. Today health services bring us problems with our bones, lipids, breathing, glucose, blood pressure, and even our moods. The managers of health services require staff to keep to guidelines, which means giving us medicines in order to reduce the risks we pose the services rather than to help us. In the 1980s few of us were on more than one drug. Now many of us are on five or more drugs every day of the year and those of us over sixty-five may be on ten or more. We have reached a crisis point—life expectancy is now falling. To restore Healthcare, we need to be able to restore validity to our judgements about the adverse effects of treatments