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by L. B. Russell, 134 pp, Washington, DC, Brookings Institute, 1986.

BEN EISEMAN, MD, Reviewer
Denver

Arch Surg. 1986;121(5):614.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

It is common knowledge that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but the author of this challenging book is not so certain. In a typically Brookings Institute, scholarly way, she dissects the available data on prevention vs cure for conditions varying from smallpox and measles through hypertension and atherosclerotic heart disease. En route, she finds room to demolish more myths about the cost-effectiveness of cancer screening. Sacred dogmas fall like ten-pins.

The book begins by exposing the fallacies of our usual accounting system for both the costs and benefits of health care. In lieu of the customary survival statistics, the author reviews the several ways by which the quality of life can be measured and emerges with a unit called "years of healthy life." Each perfectly healthy year or day can be quantified by equating 1.0 with perfect health and equating 0 with death. If her . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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