I came across this blog with an interesting perspective of the medical profession by Tom Peters. For those of you who know me well know that I don’t have a favorable opinion of traditional medicine. Tom adds a couple of good points on this topic.

Tom is really the “guru of gurus” in the field of management. He is the author of the most popular book on management “In Search of Excellence” and always has an original and outspoken viewpoint on many issues. I love his work and highly recommend it. Read below:

“The supply of doctors to an area is significantly determined by the wealth and insurance coverage of the population. Hence there are more docs per capita in well-off areas—where, in fact, medical problems are less intense per capita. This also leads in particular to an excess of specialists—lots of docs prescribe lots of tests and make lots of referrals. As to the “bottom line,” healthcare, per several sound measures, is no better in places with lotsa per capita docs than in places that are doc-deprived. It gets more interesting: The more specialists, the worse the outcomes. (More or less.) Specialists trip over one another, give conflicting advice, and are notoriously bad at cross-communication. More on specialists: The glamour and pay accorded to specialists comes at the price of less and less well-paid primary care docs—it is the vanishing primary care docs who are primarily responsible for good healthcare outcomes. Dr Elliott Fisher, Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School: “If we sent 30 percent of the doctors in this country to Africa, we might raise the level of health on both continents.”