Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America

About the Author

about the author Nortin M. Hadler, M.D., M.A.C.P., M.A.C.R., F.A.C.O.E.M. (A.B. Yale University, M.D. Harvard Medical School) trained at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Clinical Research Centre in London. He joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina in 1973 and was promoted to professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology in 1985. He serves as attending rheumatologist at the University of North Carolina Hospitals. Medical education has been a focus of his career at UNC and elsewhere. He has lectured widely, garnered multiple awards, and served lengthy visiting professorships in England, France, Israel, and Japan. He was selected as an established investigator of the American Heart Association and elected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Dr. Hadler is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, as well as its subspecialty boards in rheumatology and geriatrics and was awarded the American Board’s Certificate for Advanced Achievement in Internal Medicine. He is also a diplomate of the American Board of Allergy and Immunology. He is a fellow of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and was elevated to mastership in the American College of Physicians and the American College of Rheumatologists. He has published scientific papers across this spectrum of disciplines. The molecular biology of hyaluran and the immunobiology of peptidoglycans were the focus of Dr. Hadler’s early investigative career, to be superseded in the 1980s by his fascination with what he initially termed “industrial rheumatology.” For thirty years, he has been a student of “the illness of work incapacity”; over 200 papers and 12 books bear witness to this interest. He has detailed the various sociopolitical constraints imposed by many nations to the challenges of applying disability and compensation insurance schemes to such predicaments as back pain and arm pain in the workplace. He has dissected the fashion in which medicine turns disputative, and thereby iatrogenic, in the process of disability determination, whether for back or arm pain or a more global illness narrative such as is labeled “fibromyalgia.” He is widely regarded for his critical assessment of the limitations of certainty regarding medical and surgical management of the regional musculoskeletal disorders. The third edition of his monograph Occupational Musculoskeletal Disorders was published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins in 2005 and provides a ready resource as to his thinking on the regional musculoskeletal disorders. In the past decade, Dr. Hadler has turned his critical razor to much that is considered contemporary medicine at its finest. His assaults on medicalization and overtreatment appear in many editorials and commentaries and four recent books: The Last Well Per- 356 | about the author son: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System (McGill-Queens University Press, 2004), Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (UNC Press, 2008), Stabbed in the Back: Confronting Back Pain in an Overtreated Society (UNC Press, 2009), and Rethinking Aging: Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society (UNC Press, 2011). The first three have been published in French translation by Les Presses de l’Université Laval / Les Éditions de l’IQRC: Le Dernier des Bien-Portants, Malades d’inquiétude?, and Poignardé dans le dos. ...