Excerpt:
"What is perhaps surprising, but very important if one cares about optimising health spending, is how almost completely unimportant all the expensive stuff is for health. Major hospital operations, ICUs, designer medicines and so on basically do not move the dial, for three big reasons that medics often do not like to talk about.

The first is that hospitals are unhealthy places where visitors run major risks of getting sicker rather than getting better. The WHO, when it was still being useful, advertised studies that estimated that some 15 percent of people going to hospital pick up a nasty bug there, because after all it is where seriously sick people (including those sick with nasty bugs) go. That is a high risk that is practically never mentioned in the cost-benefit studies pharmaceutical companies churn out when marketing their latest wares.

Second, lots of expensive medicines and operations are given to people who are very close to death and have multiple other ailments, so preventing them from dying of one thing often just postpones death by a few weeks. The upshot is that the end of life is made lonelier, more painful and more stressful, but extremely profitable to both the hospital and Big Pharma.

Again, this is practically always downplayed in commercial health studies via a few useful tricks, like insisting that both treatment and placebo group have no other ailment than the one being studied and are thus much healthier than is true in practice.

Another trick is to compare an expensive new drug with an expensive old drug, and both only on fairly healthy populations rather than the sick ones who are more frequent drug recipients in practice. Much of the health system profits from the fear of death, with in-built massive exaggeration of benefits and underestimation of costs in the medical studies that routinely pop up in the Big Pharma advertising magazines (like the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and so on).

A third reason why expensive interventions don’t move the dial much is that many of the medicines and operations pushed by Pharma and medics don’t actually work. For example, only 50% of drugs that get preliminary access to the US markets (after passing Phase II of that process) make it to full access (Phase III), with even fewer getting full approval, though they still make money for their manufacturers and distributors while being in ‘pending’ purgatory.

Also, tellingly, the large literature on ‘supply-induced demand’ (a booming line of research in the 1990s that has become a trickle in the top journals over the last 10 years) includes studies in which members of a doctor’s family were found to have received fewer operations on average than non-family individuals advised by the same doctor.

By implication, both the industry and the doctors themselves know that the benefits of their expensive interventions are exaggerated."
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Bottom line: Big Pharma (and their corrupt government conspirators) are lying, cheating, murdering scum.
Never do what they say to do and you'll live longer.