Scars and keloids

promote appropriate goals such as furthering high quality medicine, patient centred care, and efficient use of resources. 10 11 The difficulty is to avoid or minimise the perverse side effects of incentives. That goal requires careful use of incentives, evaluation of their effect, and a fair dose of scepticism. Health policy makers in much of the world today embrace uncritically the use of incentives for doctors, ignoring their problems and risks. Instead they should treat incentives like drugs-a powerful product that can be beneficial but also dangerous. Society should control the use of incentives for doctors carefully to ensure that they are safe as well as effective in the way they are used.