12th Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture: How to Decide Which Medical and Health Information You Should Trust
Fake news? Alternative facts? Overly hyped “breakthroughs”? Irreproducible scientific research results? Preprints? Gaslighting the medical literature? What to do?
Finding and trusting the best published primary medical literature is the answer. Our speakers for the 12th Annual Lundberg Institute Lecture at The Commonwealth Club, JAMA Editor in Chief Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and BMJ Editor in Chief Kamran Abbasi, are among the premier guardians of that literature. Hear their advice, and then ask them your own questions about whom and what to trust—especially now when deciding which medical information is trustworthy has become so crucial and so confusing.
Dr Kizer is a graduate of both Stanford and UCLA. He is board certified in 6 medical specialties and subspecialties, author of >500 articles, books, and chapters. Best known for having systematically transformed the Veterans Healthcare System in the 1990s when serving as the Undersecretary for Health, Dr Kizer’s career achievements in patient safety, quality of care, and population health are staggering in creativity, scope, and impact. Fields as disparate as emergency medical services, tobacco control, HIV/AIDS, and managed care have been shaped by his pioneering efforts in California and the nation. For much of his professional life, his home base has been Sacramento and his academic home, U C Davis.
Gary Taubes, Author of best selling books Good Calories; Bad Calories (2007) and Why We Get Fat (2010) brings the audience up to date from his best selling 2016 The Case Against Sugar.
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back,” the talk will look at just that. Everyone knows that the U.S. health system is by far the most expensive in the world, with spending/prices for drugs, procedures and hospitalizations that are many times those in other developed countries. And for all that, we don’t generally get better care or better results. I’ll look at the evolution of the U.S. health system over the last 3 decades and how it moved from a caring endeavor to a financially driven system where profit rather than patient good was the prime motivation. I’ll trace how commercial forces and interests were allowed to insinuate themselves into medical practice, step-by-step, so no one protested much…or even noticed…until the prices got sky high. We now live in a system where medical machinery comes with brochures on how to recoup return-on-investment and ambulance companies as well as dialysis units are owned by venture capital firms. But the ultimate message is one of optimism and hope. Once patients-voters-consumers understand how the system functions and how our healthcare has been hijacked for profit, the book offers many ways to push back, to begin untangling the mess we’re in. I discuss some of those, from strategies to protect your wallet when you enter the hospital or doctor’s office to reforms that should be voter issues at the state and national level. I believe that if patients and physicians stand up for medicine we will get better, cheaper care. The books ends: “Given the false choice between your money or your life, it’s time to take a stand for the latter.
