《大学英语自学教程》上册2.docVIP

大学英语自学教程(上) 16-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 healthcare 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 opeations 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 general 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 per-formed 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. In the recent past, medical researchers have begun to emphasize the fact that heart disease is associated with stress, smoking an