Doctor Otis Brawley exposes the dangers of overtreatment - USATODAY.com

ATLANTA – The woman walked quietly into the busy emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta's safety net hospital for the poor and uninsured. She waited four or five hours to be seen, sitting patiently on a gurney and clutching a plastic bag.

Inside the bag was a moist blue towel. Wrapped inside that towel was her right breast. She was hoping it could be reattached.

Doctors in the United States don't see cancer patients like this every day. A mixture of fear, poverty and lack of paid sick leave had led her to delay cancer treatment for years. Eventually, the tumor grew so large that it cut off the blood supply, causing her right breast to die and fall off, says Otis Brawley, chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, who saw the woman in the ER that morning in 2003.

In his new book, How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America, Brawley presents the woman's suffering as a metaphor for a rotting health system that is run, he says, "by the greedy serving the gluttonous.".

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  Michael A. Schwarz, USA TODAY

  Otis Brawley, professor of hematology and oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, visits with patients at Grady Memorial Hospital. He is accompanied by Amanda Yassin, Pharmacy student at South University, and Brian Lingerfelt, oncology fellow at Grady Memorial Hospital.

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via yourlife.usatoday.com

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