George Ross Fisher

The Best Medicine: How to Choose the Top Doctors, the Top Hospitals and the Top Treatments

Control of the medical system in America rests with physicians, because patients ordinarily go first to their primary care physician for direction to other components of the system. So long as physicians are free to choose what they think best for the patient, hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, durable equipment manufacturers, and other medical vendors must treat physicians very gingerly. This book offers advice to patients about the selection of medical care. Anything that affects the choice of physician has considerable potential effect on contenders for the other 90% of medical revenue. It is not likely to be an overstatement that all other components of the medical industry have secret dreams of either freeing themselves from the need to be designated by any physician at all or, alternatively, narrowing the access of the public to particular physicians who can be counted on as captives of a specific referral configuration. In this book,