Mail & Guardian, 25 July 2019
"Doctors prescribe fewer drugs and do fewer operations when they know they’re being watched, an Irish organisation has found. Here’s why.
Doctors in South Africa and abroad cause thousands of avoidable deaths each year by ordering unnecessary tests, surgeries and hospital admissions for their patients. That’s according to Louisine Alpern, co-founder of the Irish medical services organisation Medical Reviews International, or MedRev.
Alpern was speaking at the annual conference of the Board of Healthcare Funders of Southern Africa (BHF) in Cape Town this week.
“It’s an epidemic of overtreatment,” she warned.
Physicians who overuse medical services have more to do, and are also more likely to make mistakes, Alpern explained. In the US alone, medical errors cause a quarter of a million unnecessary deaths each year, according to a 2016 paper published in the British Journal of Medicine."
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