Less Medicine, More Health. H. Gilbert Welsh. 2015. 194 pages

Dr. Welsh is a brilliant professor of family medicine at Dartmouth. He and I have exchanged emails about our previous books, his Overdiagnosed and my Medicine Outside The Box which have a lot in common although I will never match his writing skills. We share many iconoclastic views about modern medicine. So when I saw this later book in the library, I knew I had to read it.

In a scholarly compelling treatise, laced with numerous anecdotes and humour, Dr. Welsh destroys seven myths about modern medical practices: all risks can be lowered, it is always better to fix the problem, sooner is always better, it never hurts to get more information, action is always better than inaction, newer is always better and, it’s all about avoiding death. His anecdotes sometimes relate real tragedies, such as the orthopaedic surgeon who developed life-threatening and difficult to detect chromium poisoning as a result of choosing the newest hip prosthesis for himself.

This book is an easy compelling read that should be of interest to anyone who is ever a patient, i.e. pretty much everyone. There is considerable overlap in the information with that in Overdiagosed. If forced by time constraints to choose one or the other, I would recommend Less Medicine. More Health.

Now for one negative. In the introduction, he relates the story of a man who almost bleed to death after having a liver biopsy of a mass that was found on imaging while investigatingD an unrelated problem. The mass was an innocuous hemangioma. I happen to know a bit about this subject and why anyone would ever biopsy a liver mass that turned out to be an hemangioma is beyond me. The imaging characteristics of the very common liver hemangiomata are diagnostic, and there is never a need for a biopsy. This was not a good example of feeling the need for more information but rather an obvious medical mistake. Apart from this poor example of the messages he is delivering, I cannot find any fault with this book.