Most of us want and expect medicine s miracles to extend our lives. In today s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see it s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm s more is better approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002...