Prevention vs. Treatment What's the Right Balance?

by Faust, Halley S.; Menzel, Paul T.

• ISBN13: 9780199837373
• ISBN10: 0199837376
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Everyone knows the old adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," but we seem not to live by it. In the Western world's health care it is commonly observed that prevention is underfunded while treatment attracts greater overall priority. This book explores this observation by examining the actual spending on prevention, the history of health policies and structural features that affect prevention's apparent relative lack of emphasis, the values that may justify priority for treatment or for prevention, and the religious and cultural traditions that have shaped the moral relationship between these two types of care. Economists, scholars of public health and preventive medicine, philosophers, lawyers, and religious ethicists contribute specific sophisticated discussions. Their descriptions and claims lean in various directions and are often surprising. For example, the imbalance between prevention and treatment may not be as great as is often thought, and we may be spending excessively on many preventive measures just as we do on treatments compelled by the felt demands of rescue. A standard practice in health economics that disadvantages prevention, "discounting" the value of future lives, may rest on weak empirical and moral grounds. And it is an "apocalyptic" religious tradition (Seventh-day Adventism) whose members have put some of the strongest and most effective priority on long-term prevention. Prevention vs. Treatment is distinctive in carefully clarifying the nature of the empirical and moral debates about the proper balance of prevention and treatment; the book pursues those debates from a wide range of perspectives, many not often heard from in health policy.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 2
Six Rules of Raw Fight Club	p. 13
Why Go Raw Extreme?	p. 21
How to Go Raw Extreme	p. 33
Raw Extreme Recipes from A to Z	p. 87
Index	p. 151
Intermediate-Strength Transparent-Access Theories	p. 156
The Tagging Hypothesis	p. 156
Attitudinal Working Memory	p. 166
Awareness of Action	p. 178
The Active Mind	p. 187
Conclusion	p. 190
Inner Sense Theories	p. 192
Inner Sense and Mindreading: Three Theories	p. 192
Developmental Evidence	p. 203
Emotional Mirroring	p. 209
Unsymbolized Thinking	p. 214
Conclusion	p. 222
Mindreading in Mind	p. 223
The Theoretical Options	p. 223
Why Mindreading Matters	p. 230
Evidence of Early Mindreading	p. 240
Explaining the Gap	p. 248
Mindreading in Animals	p. 254
Conclusion	p. 259
Metacognition and Control	p. 261
Inner Sense versus ISA	p. 261
Human Metacognition	p. 263
Human Meta-Reasoning	p. 272
Animal Metacognition	p. 278
Epistemic Emotions in Humans and Animals	p. 288
Conclusion	p. 292
Dissociation Data	p. 293
Schizophrenia	p. 293
Autism	p. 301
Alexithymia	p. 309
Images of the Brain	p. 311
Conclusion	p. 324
Self-Interpretation and Confabulation	p. 325
The Limits of Introspection	p. 326
When Will the Two Methods Operate?	p. 333
Confabulated Decisions, Intentions, and Judgments	p. 339
Self-Perception Data	p. 345
Dissonance Data	p. 356
Concluding Comments	p. 365
Conclusion and Implications	p. 368
Summary: The Case Against Transparent Access to Attitudes	p. 368
Eliminating Most Kinds of Conscious Attitude	p. 373
Eliminating Conscious Agency	p. 379
Rethinking Responsibility	p. 381
Conclusion	p. 383
References	p. 384
Index of Names	p. 419
Index of Subjects	p. 434
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