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by aterimperator 5515 days ago
Citation? Obviously healthcare works on some level, else life expectancy wouldn't be going up.
2 comments

Really? You could make life expectancy go up in much of the world with nothing more than clean water. But is that healthcare?
Maybe, but you'd also be ignoring other basic staples of western healthcare like vaccinations.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2284/

Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).

Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.

In terms of citations, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=161308 at least for the end-of-life effects. Also see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam... and http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1000678 and http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/beware-active-placebos... and http://papers.nber.org/papers/W16011 and the RAND health insurance study. For a start, at least.

not just life expectancy in toto which you would rightly expect to have a huge number of variables that interact in unknown ways. many medical procedures have proven to be directly detrimental to health in double blind studies yet remain standard procedure.

read this to become completely disillusioned with medicine. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/catheter-infection-law...