Reddit mentions of Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care

WOW, SHE SOUNDS AWESOME! I will read everything on her page. There are a few brave physicians who are speaking out against their own institutions and practices. One is Martin Makary, whose wonderful book, "Unaccountable" has given me A lot of the behind the scenes information that has helped me understand how these events unfold. I really appreciate his candor and refusal to participate in the closed doors of preventable medical errors If anyone is interested, his terrific book can be found here:

https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountable-Hospitals-Transparency-Revolutionize-Health/dp/1608198383/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1479348082&sr=8-3-fkmr0&keywords=Accountable+Marty,

Another wonderfully compassionate and kind physician, whose work is devoted to the intractable pain sufferer, is Forest Tennant, MD, who wrote a terrific handbook called, "The Intractable Pain Sufferers Handbook."

http://www.foresttennant.com/pdfs/Intractable-pain-guide-to-pain-free-hours.pdf

Most of my ability to cope has come directly from his book. Anyone who suffers from chronic, intractable pain would benefit so much from this handbook, I believe. He has devoted his career to working with us, the type of patient with whom many physicians prefer not to work, (or consider us unwanted patients), as we generally have no cure and are usually just trying to minimize our suffering. We can be very depressing as patients, understandably.

Here's the link to the book on amazon if you're interested in reading :) Has some good ideas for accountability that might apply to medical abuse of patients and so patients can find out about incompetent doctors as well: https://www.amazon.com/Unaccountable-Hospitals-Transparency-Revolutionize-Health/dp/1608198383

You're kidding, right? A lot of things. I'll name only a couple, but I'm not interested in debating this here. I'm just saying there do exist reasons. First, price is a terrible way to choose a doctor without very rigid standards either of doctor quality or doctor outcome reporting. Health care is far from a commodity. But many visits to doctors occur in situations where one does not have the luxury of shopping. Unless you are outright unconscious, financial and disclosure agreements are shoved in your face as you are being admitted, signed arguably under duress, and your options to go elsewhere are limited by time, by uncertainty about whether competing institutions will be reachable, will be open, or will have capacity. But even in those cases that are in advance of something urgent, you have the problem that there is no feedback about how well your doctor is doing because hospitals hide the necessary information. See the book Unaccountable if you want some examples. (That URL is to Amazon, just so you have something to browse, but I don't get a cut. The author does a good job of explaining why there's too much opacity for useful shopping.)