This groundbreaking book explains prognosis from the perspective of doctors, examining why physicians are reluctant to predict the future, how doctors use prognosis, the symbolism it contains, and the emotional difficulties it involves. Drawing on his experiences as a doctor and sociologist, Nicholas Christakis interviewed scores of physicians and searched dozens of medical textbooks and medical school curricula for discussions of prognosis in an attempt to get to the core of this nebulous medical issue that, despite its importance, is only partially understood and rarely discussed.

"Highly recommended for everyone from patients wrestling with their personal prognosis to any medical practitioner touched by this bioethical dilemma."—Library Journal, starred review

"[T]he first full general discussion of prognosis ever written. . . . [A] manifesto for a form of prognosis that's equal parts prediction-an assessment of likely outcomes based on statistical averages-and prophecy, an intuition of what lies ahead."—Jeff Sharlet, Chicago Reader

"[S]ophisticated, extraordinarily well supported, and compelling. . . . [Christakis] argues forcefully that the profession must take responsibility for the current widespread avoidance of prognosis and change the present culture. This prophet is one whose advice we would do well to heed."—James Tulsky, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine

This collection of eight essays examines the health, disease, and medical care of the American West—an area flanked by the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and Cascade Mountains. Topics include Mormons and the Thomsonian Movement in the nineteenth century, the silicosis epidemic in hardrock mining, Native American health, frontier nursing, and Chinese medicine.

When federal and state policy makers’ efforts to enact sweeping health care reform in the mid-1990s ended in stalemate, the private sector unleashed initiatives that have affected virtually every aspect of health care. With updated essays first published in issues of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Healthy Markets? offers the most comprehensive and critical examination yet found in a single volume of the economic, political, and social implications of this recent market transformation of health care in the United States.
With original contributions from leading social science health policy analysts, this volume addresses the full context of health system change. Believing that the analysis of health care change is too important to be left to economists alone, Mark A. Peterson has collected a mulitdisciplinary group of experts who revisit the contentious debate over the market approaches to health care and consider the disparate effects of these approaches on cost, quality, and coverage of both managed care and Medicaid and Medicare. While market enthusiasts applaud the enhanced efficiency, reduced excess capacity, and abatement of the decades-long health care cost explosion, a backlash has emerged among many providers and the public against the perceived excesses of the market: diminished access to care, commercialization of the physician-patient relationship, and exacerbated inequality. Contributors assess these varied responses while examining the impact that market-based applications are likely to have for future health policy making, the significance of the U.S. experience for policy makers abroad, and the lessons that these changes might provide for thinking sensibly about the future of our health care system.
This volume will be useful for public policy analysts, economists, social scientists, health care providers and administrators, and others interested in the future—and in understanding the past—of American health care.

Contributors. Gary S. Belkin, Lawrence D. Brown, Robert G. Evans, Martin Gaynor, Paul B. Ginsburg, Marsha Gold, Theodore R. Marmor, Cathie Jo Martin, Jonathan B. Oberlander, Mark V. Pauly, Mark A. Peterson, Thomas Rice, Deborah A. Stone, William B. Vogt, Kenneth E. Thorpe