Brazil and my life in Health Technology Assessment

My father wanted me to be a physician (as a farmers' son, he was too poor to go to medical school, but that was his ambition for me). In medical school in North Carolina, USA, I had no introduction to public health or evaluation of medical interventions. My favorite professor was a cardiologist, so I intended to become an academic cardiologist 1,2 . He said the only thing I remember up until then on either public health or evaluation, concerning a clinical trial of anticoagulants to prevent coronary artery disease. As a medical intern and resident, I also learned little of either public health or evaluation. However, I do remember that we were encouraged to experiment on patients. I particularly remember trying out a popular technology, "gastric freezing in bleeding peptic ulcer", which I remembered with regret later, when trials came out showing that the practice was useless and harmful 3

Environmental health · Geography · Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life · Medicine · Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare · Gerontology

• A investigação em serviços de saúde e a pandemia de Covid-19

  Open Access•Claudia Travassos•Cadernos de Saude Publica•2020

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• Role strains of a health care team in a poverty community

  Open Access•H David Banta, Richard C Fox et al.•Social Science & Medicine (1967•1972

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