Last year I reviewed the book, Money Driven Medicine, by Maggie Mahar. Coincidentally, about the same time we received her book, we got another one with the exact same title, but this one was by David K. Cundiff, MD. I liked this latter version a bit more than the first we’d received, mainly because it is more of an exposé, and it’s written by a physician.

You have to love doctors who come out against their own profession. More often than not, people support their profession no matter egregious it acts. You have crooked judges supporting a crooked judicial system, crooked attorneys do the same; and then we have politicians who support their party more vigorously and more rigidly than they support the constituents they represent. 

Cundiff quickly cuts to the heart of a medical system that has replaced scientific objectivity with the science of the highest bidder. Every chapter is an eye opener: Money motivated treatment; money motivated research; money motivated care. Cundiff represents the type of human being who went into medicine to help heal humanity, discovered that healing and compassion weren’t really in the job description, and not about to turn away from his ethical standards decides to blow the whistle on this crooked operation.

As a whistle blower, he was the first to lose his job working for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. He discovered that the more the Service focused on controlling pain and distressing symptoms (mainly in the dying), the less money they got from Medi-Cal reimbursement. He complained about this. He got fired.

Now…you can go out and buy this book, or you can go to his site and read the entire thing in PDF format. What a guy.