Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine

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How partisanship, polarization, and medical authority stand in the way of evidence-based medicine The U.S. medical system is touted as the most advanced in the world, yet many common treatments are not based on sound science. Treatments can go into widespread use before they are rigorously evaluated, and every year patients are harmed because they

Reviews

"Winner of the 2018 Don K. Price Award, Science, Technology & Environmental Politics Section of the American Political Science Association"
"Winner of the 2018 Louis Brownlow Book Award, National Academy of Public Administration"
"Persuasive."---Carey Goldberg, WBUR's CommonHealth blog
"The United States stands out among rich countries in resisting evidence-based medicine--not in theory, perhaps, but in practice. In this informative book, the authors, all political scientists, document this phenomenon and then consider why ordinary people, physicians, and politicians all resist public spending on research that would produce obvious benefits for everyone."---Richard N. Cooper, Foreign Affairs
"Unhealthy Politics connects the dots in the complex relationships among physicians, medical societies, the public, and politicians. . . . Unhealthy Politics, in the end, is most convincing in describing the limited extent to which evidence can guide the activities of key actors. The irony is this: For those who wish to see evidence-based medicine implemented, more and better medical evidence might not be the answer. Rather, we need better evidence about how to implement what we already know."---Romana Hasnain-Wynia, Health Affairs
"A remarkable example of the contribution that political science has to make to discussions of policy problems that have chiefly concerned other fields . . . . Patashnik, Gerber, and Dowling bring to bear not only a wealth of original survey evidence . . . but also a wealth of theoretical insights from the policy process and legislative politics literatures." * Journal of Politics *

Author Bio

Eric M. Patashnik is the Julis-Rabinowitz Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Brown University. His books include Reforms at Risk (Princeton). Alan S. Gerber is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His books include Field Experiments. Conor M. Dowling is associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. He is the coauthor of Super PAC!