"Americans consume or experience an unprecedented number of ever more powerful drugs, surgeries, and devices. Drugs and devices are often tested on "treatment naïve" bodies, even though the people who will use them are anything but. What really matters are interventions long-term impacts on our health and lifespan. Interventions can irreversibly transform our bodies and cause effects that mimic disease, creating decision making challenges and often sparking a cascade of more interventions. Americans have become dependent on interventions. Dr. Robert Aronowitz explains medicines challenges by pouring over the medical literature and reflecting on patients experiences and his own. He uncovers detailed historical case studies of how these challenges have played out over the last century: in the problematic quest to know the best ways to care for the most intervened-in and vulnerable body, the premature infant; in the transformed experience of prostate cancer driven by changing diagnostic and therapeutic practices; and in the ways the term overdiagnosis has been used in medicine to hide another problem, prognostic ignorance.

The book includes clinical and policy recommendations to lead us out of the labyrinth. It sounds a call for "slow medicine," and for paying more attention to actual people and the dilemmas they face"-- Provided by publisher.