The Last Well Person (How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System)

Dr Nortin Hadler believes that heart bypass surgery is usually a waste of money, time, and energy, that treatment for prostate cancer does more harm than good, and that testing for breast cancer is not always useful or effective. The Last Well Person shows how a self-serving medical industry promotes constant monitoring and unnecessary intervention, turning healthy people into patients. Sick with worry, we have become a culture panicked over unfounded illnesses - a culture that treats everyone as a diseased time bomb.

Hadler systematically builds the case that many medical interventions are hazardous to our health. Especially insidious is the misuse of longevity statistics in turning the difficulties experienced through a natural course of life, such as aging and osteoporosis, into illnesses. He argues that unfounded assertions and flagrant marketing have led to the medicalization of everyday life and he offers practical solutions on such topics as aging, obesity, adult onset diabetes, and back problems. In The Last Well Person Hadler addresses the tough questions about our health care, cutting through the medical white noise.