Unit 16 Text A Heart Disease: Treat or prevent

one of the greatest killers in the Western world is heart disease. The death rate from the disease has been increasing at an alarming speed for the past thirty years. Today in Britain, for example, about four hundred people a day die of heart disease. Western health-care systems are spending huge sums of money on the surgical treatment of the disease.
This emphasis on treatment is clearly associated with the technological advances that have taken place in the past ten to fifteen years. In this time, modern technology has enabled doctors to develop new surgical techniques and procedures. Many operations that were considered impossible a few years ago are now performed every day in U.S. hospitals. The result has been a rapid increase in heart surgery.
Although there is no doubt that a large number of people benefit from heart surgery, critics of our health-care systems point out that the emphasis on the surgical treatment of the disease has three clear disadvantages. First, it attracts interest and financial resources away from the question of prevention. Second, it causes the costs of gengeral hospital care to rise. After hospitals buy the expensive equipment that is necessary for modern heart surgery, they must try to recover the money they have spent. To do this , they raise costs for all their patients, not just those patients whose treatment requires the equipment. The third disadvantage is that doctors are encouraged to perform surgery---even on patients for whom an operation is not at all necessary---because the equipment and surgical expertise is available. A federal government office recently said that major heart surgery was often performed even though its chances of success were low. In one type of heart surgery, for example, only 15 percent of patients benefited from the surgery.

注：因面授的上課時間調整使網絡課程的最后12講課程合并為9講來講，所講課時仍為12講。給同學帶來不便請諒解！