Surgery is often unnecessary.

Several years ago a committee of the American Congress investigating procedures of surgery in the United States came to the conclusion that 2.4 million operations are performed unnecessarily each year, costing 12,000 lives and 4 billion US dollars. The latest figures show that some 6 million unnecessary operations are performed each year.

Another study found that most people who were accepted for an operation did not actually need one and half of them did […]