Healthcare Upside Down

Inspired by witnessing and experiencing the changes in healthcare and its delivery over the past 50 years, Dr. Henry Buchwald observes and comments on the current state of healthcare in the United States. His narrative includes the history, the historical data, and personal experiences of a healthcare system that has moved away from caring, first and foremost, for patients. This expensive, impersonal system, he believes may not be in the best interest either of the nation or of the people it purports to heal.As the title suggests, it appears that healthcare has been turned upside down to serve the administrators of the system and away from its basic function of offering the best care for patients. With this basic principle in mind, the topics presented in this book provide and discuss healthcare statistics and alterations to the language of medicine. The chapters themselves examine the transformations to the medical school, the clinic and the office, the hospital, and the practice. Additional chapters discuss the role of the payers, public health research, as well as pandemics, including COVID-19, the advantages and disadvantages of socialized medicine, as well as the broken doctor/patient relationship. Finally, Dr. Buchwald offers thoughts on the areas in which future healthcare efforts can most fruitfully be expended.Analysing today’s pervading administrative domination of essentially every facet of healthcare, Healthcare Upside Down thoughtfully considers the variety of ways in which we can turn the current healthcare system right-side up to serve those who should be the ultimate beneficiaries – all of us as patients, now and in the future.

Henry Buchwald, MD, PhD, FACS, Hon FRCS (Eng) is Professor of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering and the Owen H. and Sarah Davidson Wangensteen Chair in Experimental Surgery Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Buchwald attended Columbia College and the College of Physicians Surgeons of Columbia University. He was the Principal Investigator of the twenty-year Program on the Surgical Control of the Hyperlipidemias, the first randomized clinical trial to demonstrate that cholesterol lowering by his partial ileal bypass operation resulted in reductions in cardiovascular disease and prolonged life expectancy. Buchwald was a pioneer in bariatric surgery and the coauthor and primary advocate of the concept of metabolic surgery. He holds 20 patents for bioengineering devices, including the first implantable infusion pump used in insulin delivery and continuous chemotherapy delivery. Buchwald is the author of over 360 peer-reviewed medical publications and more than 100 book chapters and books. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Obesity Surgery and writes a bi-monthly column for General Surgery News. The past president of five surgical organizations, Buchwald is the recipient of numerous awards and honors in recognition of his clinical and scholarly accomplishments, including the American College of Surgeons Jacobson Innovation Award (2019) and the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons gold medal for achievement in research (2020). He lives with his wife, Emilie Buchwald, in Minneapolis.