COLUMBUS, Ohio – You would think that spending more money on more doctors, nurses and medicine would make people feel healthier but a new study from OSU suggests the opposite may be true.
“It seems counterintuitive, but that’s what the evidence shows, said Hui Zheng, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State, about his study, which appears in the July 2015 issue of the journal Social Science Research.
Zheng says 25 years of expansion of the medical system across much of the Western world has actually led to people feeling less healthy over time.
Zheng used several large multinational datasets to examine changes in how people rated their health between 1981 and 2007 and compared that to medical expansion in 28 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an organization of countries, including the United States and many countries in Europe.
“Access to more medicine and medical care doesn’t really improve our subjective health. For example, in the United States, the percentage of Americans reporting very good health decreased from 39 percent to 28 percent from 1982 to 2006,” Zheng said.
One reason for the decline could me that more aggressive screening techniques have detected more diseases in more people, including “overdiagnosis,” which Zheng says can be harmful to healthy people.
He also says the study suggests more diseases are discovered or “created,” which increases the risk of being diagnosed with “new” diseases, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and autism.
Zheng measured three kinds of medical expansion: Medical investment, which includes health care spending per capita and total health employment; medical professionalization and specialization, which includes the number of practicing physicians and specialists; and expansion in the pharmaceutical industry, which includes pharmaceutical sales per capita.
He conducted a “counterfactual analysis” to see what would have happened if the medical industry had not expanded at all in these countries since 1982 while other factors that are generally linked to improved health, such as economic development, were left unchanged.
The analysis predicted that people’s feelings about their own health would have increased, about 10 percent in the United States, for example.
As more medical care becomes more widely available, people may expect better health, perhaps to an unrealistic degree, Zheng said.
“Consumers begin demanding more medical treatment because of the declines in subjective health and the increasing expectations of good health, and medical expansion continues. It is a cycle,” he said.