Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won’t Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care
by Marty Makary, MD
Genre: Non-Fiction, Medicine
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publish Date: September 18, 2012
Format: Hardcover | 256 pages
Rating: 5 of 5
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and an Associate Professor of Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, reveals a medical culture of unaccountability in most of our nation’s hospitals. For patients, the healthcare process is not transparent or easy to navigate. Under the current system they have no way of comparing doctors and hospitals, or obtaining statistics on performance. This book is a starting point for healing our broken healthcare system.
In the US, the practice of medicine is one of the most advanced in the world when it comes to drugs, devices and procedures, but we fall behind when it comes to transparency, accountability and patient advocacy. Patients seeking answers and information routinely run into a brick wall of silence. It was my own personal experience advocating for a family member in the hospital which led me to do hours of research and many, many hours of frustration. A low point for the medical system came when a doctor attempted to intimidate me by declaring that I needed to stop asking so many questions, that I was causing a problem and that my mother was happy with his care. Never mind that mom was no longer competent to make those decisions alone.
This is a fascinating, well-researched account and an inside look at what physicians and nurses have known for a long time. As hospitals have merged into giant corporations they have evolved away from the friendly community hospital to a large, for profit institution. I applaud Dr. Makary for breaking the medical culture’s unwritten code of silence and exposing practices that are in place for financial gain and not in the best interests of patients.
Written in an easy to read, engaging style, the book contains many stories and anecdotes about medical school, patients Dr. Makary has treated and doctors he has worked with. He talks about dangerous zones within a hospital, for example a hospital will have a high error rate on a certain procedure but not feel any need to correct it, and dangerous doctors who make too many mistakes but are never held accountable, how in some cases greed can be overpowering and how hospitals pressure doctors to perform by encouraging a high number of procedures per day.
The chapter on drug companies and pharmaceuticals confirms what many of us already know. Drug companies provide bonuses and incentives and practically bribe doctors to prescribe the newest and most expensive products. Chemotherapy drug sales are especially disturbing. The hospitals purchase the drugs and resell them at a high markup; the patient cannot shop for a better price.
Transparency is utmost; patients should never be afraid to ask questions or get a second or even third opinion. The author mentions google and feels it has had a positive impact in empowering patients with information needed to make a good decision. I hope the day will soon be here when we can compare hospital performance and obtain statistics on doctor’s practices. Until then we have to continue asking questions and strive to be an informed consumer.
Read this book now, before you need it.
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Source: Borrowed copy from the public library.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The November host is Kathy at BermudaOnion’s Weblog .
Only one book this week, an AudioMovie which is described as an audiobook featuring a full cast and sound effects. This will be a new experience for me. I’m expecting it to be similar to a radio production.
For review from Audiobook Jukebox:
Resonance
by A.J. Scudiere
The shift is coming. Soon. Dr. David Carter knows this. However, he’s a geologist, so ‘soon’ means anywhere from tomorrow to a thousand years from now. Whole species died at the last polar shift. 65 million years ago. Right now Dr. Becky Sorenson has some seriously mutated frogs in her lab. In L.A. Bees are making abnormal columns on the side of the freeways. In Georgia, birds are migrating out of season. It all makes a sick kind of sense when the doctors consider that the last magnetic shift is strangely coincidental to the dinosaur die-out. And the only similarity in the problems today is that each is occurring in a ‘hotspot’ – a pocket of reverse polarity tells them all them all the shift is already here.
What are you reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Welcome to my stop on the Clear Your Shelves Giveaway Hop hosted by Kathy of I am a Reader Not a Writer. Over 100 blogs are participating and each is giving away a book or books from their shelves. The hop runs from today through November 18th.
My Giveaway
My giveaway is open to US addresses only but others are open internationally. Click HERE for a list of participating blogs.
I’m offering a choice of several books that are not my type and that I know I will never get around to reading.
Fantasy:
Bearers of the Black Staff (Legends of Shannara #1)
by Terry Brooks (ARC, does not have final cover art)
or
Non-Fiction:
K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain
by Ed Viesturs
How to Enter
- Contest is open to anyone with a US mailing address age 13 or older.
- To enter, fill out the form below.
- For an extra entry follow my facebook page
- For another extra entry tweet or blog about the giveaway
- The deadline for entry is midnight November 18th, Eastern time. I will draw one random winner who will be contacted by email and will have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address.
Click HERE for a list of over 100 other blogs that are participating in the hop.
[Contest has ended]
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The Red-breasted Nuthatch is a small, energetic bird that can be found in the US and Canada. Their preferred habitats are the northern woods and mountains. They are migratory but will often spend winters in their breeding range.
If food is in short supply, they will begin to migrate south. This is called irruptive migration because their movements are in response to food availability, habitat, or weather. They will travel only as far as they need to go. A true migrant will make the same predictive journey each year.
I have a lot of the more common White-breasted Nuthatches in my backyard, but rarely see the Red-breasted Nuthatch. Last month they began appearing at my peanut and sunflower seed feeders. To say I was excited was a bit of an understatement.
A little research on eBird told me that this year was a poor summer for cone crops in the northern forests and the Red-breasted Nuthatches began migrating south as early as August. Bird watchers across the US are reporting sightings.
The nuthatches that are now in my yard are busy taking peanuts from the feeder and stashing them in several nearby pine trees. I think they’ll be staying with me for the winter.
My regular group of White-breasted Nuthatches don’t seem to mind them and they have been peacefully sharing the feeder. The red-breasted is a little smaller and can be readily identified by their bold, black eye stripe. They are also much more active, constantly in motion and rarely pausing or staying still.
They are friendly little birds and let me get quite close to them but it still took me a few days to get a shot that wasn’t blurry. In the photo above, red and white even posed for a shot together!
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Last week I harvested all of my Acorn Squash. I would have waited for a frost to kill off the plants, but a feisty squirrel decided to start her own harvest so I had to act quickly if I wanted to eat any of them myself.
This is the first year I planted Acorn Squash in the garden and the harvest was better than I expected. In the past I’ve grown only zucchini plants, but I always end up with too many zucchini all at once. By the end of the summer no one wants a free zucchini, so this year I planted half zucchini, half acorn squash. Acorn Squash have a hard shell and a long shelf life. I now have a box of them that will store for a month or so in a cool area. I may need to find a few more ways to prepare them.
Recipe
My usual method of cooking the squash is to cut one in half and bake, but that takes over an hour before it’s ready to eat. I read that cutting them into rings will make them cook much faster, so I gave that a try using my basic recipe of butter and brown sugar. Yup, it worked just fine. Very tasty and they looked nice too.
Ingredients:
• Acorn squash
• Unsalted butter
• Brown sugar
• Salt
Preparation
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Using a serrated knife, cut squash crosswise into one half inch slices. Once the center exposed, scoop out the seeds (which can roasted the same as pumpkin seeds or discarded).
Place the squash rings on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. If not using parchment paper the baking sheet should be lightly oiled. (If you’ve never tried parchment paper, it’s the best thing since paper plates. I will never go back to greasing a pan again.)
Add small dots of butter to each squash ring and sprinkle with a little brown sugar.
Bake for 20 minutes. Turn the rings half way through and add more butter and sugar and season with salt.
And that feisty squirrel?
Since the garden is done for the winter, the apples have fallen off the tree, and the walnut tree had a lean year, she’s been busy trying to break into the bird feeders.
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Almost wordless: Cute, I know, but this little Fox Squirrel is a menace! She thinks the apple tree, everything growing in the garden and all the bird seed are for her.
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More Wordless Wednesday. © 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Gone
by Randy Wayne White
Narrated by Renee Raudman
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Publish Date: September 4, 2012
Format: Audio, 8 hours | 42 minutes
Audio Listening Level: Easy – Intermediate
Rating: 2½ of 5 
Publisher’s Summary:
Hannah Smith: a tall, strong, formidable Florida woman, the descendant of generations of strong Florida women. She makes her living as a fishing guide, but her friends, neighbors, and clients also know her as an uncommonly resourceful woman with a keen sense of justice—someone who can’t be bullied—and they have taken to coming to her with their problems.Her methods can be unorthodox, though, and those on the receiving end of them often wind up very unhappy—and sometimes very violent. And when a girl goes missing, and Hannah is asked to find her, that is exactly what happens.
This is the first installment in a new series by Randy Wayne White. Set on the gulf coast of Florida, it will be familiar territory for readers of his previous novels and a few references are made to the characters in the Doc Ford books.
Hannah is described as a formidable woman, and I liked the attempt to create a strong character, but too often Hannah appears stereotypical and flat. There was a lot of sexist dialog that I assume was aimed at the male readers, and it was very obvious this was written by a man. Most women, at least those I am acquainted with, do not talk like Hannah. At one point I wasn’t sure if Hannah was gay or straight when a woman tried to pick her up and she didn’t make her position very clear. Not that it mattered, but why create confusion for the reader? That’s more of a male fantasy.
I would have liked a little more plot but most of the book was spent developing Hannah’s character and explaining the workings of her boat. I tried, but I could not connect with her. One minute she’s this helpless thing and the next she is fearless, out on boat, in pursuit of the bad guys.
I listened to the audio which moved along at a nice pace. I wasn’t thrilled with the accent for the bad guy; the narrator portrayed him with such an annoying voice I wanted someone to bump him off just to get him to shut up, but the rest of the voices were fine.
Why did I keep listening? Aside from hoping it would get better, I was outside listening using my mp3 player while painting my garden shed and I didn’t want to stop and load another book. So I kept listening. Perhaps being the first in a new series, the author will make a few tweaks and the next book will be an improvement. Hannah does have potential and this wasn’t awful, but it could have been much better.
I would give the next book in the series a chance, but Hannah better mature a little if I’m going to stick around.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
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