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Quality-of-life questions are becoming increasingly important in medical care, especially when it comes to helping patients make decisions about treatments, today’s Informed Patient column reports.

Since the 1970s, researchers have been using quality-of-life measurement tools for a wide variety of medical conditions, primarily in population studies and clinical trials. Outside the U.S. they are often used by national medical systems to help determine payment policies for more costly drugs or treatments.

“Health and medicine books tend to be long on advice and how-to, and short on compelling narrative and literary merit,” writes Laura Landro in her Informed Patient column today.

But the books she’s picked as her top five of the year prove to be exceptions. They range from a gripping history of surgical practice to a critical investigation of one of the nation’s toughest inner-city hospitals.

Excerpts from each are below. You can read the full article here.

By Louise Radnofsky

Doctors’ feelings about the health-care overhaul law passed last year are about as mixed as their patients’, research released today shows.

Some 44% of doctors said the law was “a good start,” according to a survey carried out by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions consulting group. Another 44% agreed that the law was “a step in the wrong direction.”

Many of the 501 physicians surveyed indicated that they had sour feelings about specific aspects of the law.

There’s a lot of concern today that paying fees to medical providers for each service may lead to unnecessary care. But there’s no easy way to replace the massively complicated fee-for-service system.

Your doctor may secretly think you’re making too many office visits and getting too many drugs and tests.

A survey of primary-care doctors conducted in 2009 finds that 42% of the 627 respondents believed the patients in their own practice were getting too much care. Just 6% of doctors believed their patients were getting too little care. (The rest thought the level of care was just right.)

With doctors often pressed for time, a new federal campaign aims to to improve communication by getting  patients to ask more questions and prioritize their concerns before a visit, today’s Informed Patient column reports.

The U.S. economy added more jobs than expected last month. And the health-care industry showed particular strength, with 31,300 new jobs — higher than the average monthly increase seen in 2007, before the recession hit.

Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showing sector-by-sector job growth, and here’s the overall report, which shows non-farm payrolls rose by 117,000 while the unemployment rate dropped slightly to 9.1%.

The medical residents starting their training today belong to a generation that doesn’t think twice about broadcasting even intimate details of their lives via texts, Twitter and other social media.

That can get tricky when those doctors’ lives begin to include patients.