That’s the finding of Adriana Lleras-Muney and David Cutler in a July 2006 working paper recently noted by the New York Times.
Knowledge in the form of diagnosis, however, may not be good according to the doctors who wrote another essay in the Times. They state
The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
