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#11 stocks

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Posted 13 December 2010 - 03:20 PM

How to Stay Well Despite the Health-care System

Answer true or false to these ten statements:

(1) Cardiovascular surgery clearly and unequivocally benefits the patient.
(2) Even though obesity (which is unhealthy) is on the rise in America, American life expectancy is increasing.
(3) There are very reliable methods for screening that spares us the risk of dying from colorectal cancer before our time.
(4) Mammography is of much value to the women screened.
(5) Prostate gland screening for males doesn't work.
(6) It is abnormal to live two years without a backache.
(7) One of the potentially dangerous acts physicians perform is to take a "history" from a patient.
(8) Bone thinning is an insidious illness.
(9) Psychological and social stress is not all bad.
(10) There is compelling evidence that acupuncture, physical therapy, massage, therapeutic touch, and distant healing work for physical complaints.

If you answered true to any one of statements (1,3,4,8,10) or false to any one of statements (2,5,6,7,9), then you may benefit from this enlightening book authored by medical professor Dr. Nortin Hadler.


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#12 stocks

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Posted 15 July 2011 - 08:03 AM

Doctor Faces Suits Over Cardiac Stents

“What was going on in Baltimore is going on right now in every city in America,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, who said he routinely treats patients who have been given multiple unneeded stents. “We’re spending a fortune as a country on procedures that people don’t need.”


Doctor Loses License


He’s accused of performing unnecessary surgical procedures on hundreds of his patients. And now many of those patients are celebrating news that state yanked Dr. Marc Midei’s medical license.

Marrs is one of 585 people who received a letter from St. Joseph Medical Center saying Midei may have unnecessarily given her a stent–a tiny device designed to open up blocked arteries. A charge Midei has vehemently denied.

Stents
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#13 traderx

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Posted 15 July 2011 - 09:16 AM

So if these screenings and procedures don't prolong our lives, what does? About 85 percent of your mortal hazard lives in two questions: Are you comfortable in your socioeconomic status? And do you like your job? If you say no to either or both of those, that represents some of the most powerful mortal hazards that we are able to document. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where is the documentation for this? Most surveys show that way over 50% do not like their jobs------so you think they will die from this. Longevity keeps going up-------- Statins -Cholestrol medicine has way cut way down deaths from heart disease in the last 20 years

#14 stocks

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Posted 15 July 2011 - 09:49 AM

So if these screenings and procedures don't prolong our lives, what does?
Where is the documentation?
Statins -Cholestrol medicine has way cut way down deaths from heart disease in the last 20 years

Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

“People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.


It’s a disturbing view, with huge implications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims.

A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease
. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary.

Even a cursory glance at medical journals shows that once heralded studies keep falling by the wayside. Two 1993 studies concluded that vitamin E prevents cardiovascular disease; that claim was overturned by more rigorous experiments, in 1996 and 2000. A 1996 study concluding that estrogen therapy reduces older women’s risk of Alzheimer’s was overturned in 2004. Numerous studies concluding that popular antidepressants work by altering brain chemistry have now been contradicted (the drugs help with mild and moderate depression, when they work at all, through a placebo effect), as has research claiming that early cancer detection (through, say, PSA tests) invariably saves lives. The list goes on.

Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly the extent that medications have. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would evaporate if we studied them closely,” Ioannidis says.


Medicine Newsweek

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.


That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.

His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views

Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).

http://www.theatlant...l-science/8269/

Publication Bias

... the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for.

Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.

Selective Reporting


... an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.

The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me.

Acupuncture


One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see

The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect.


Bias science
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#15 traderx

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Posted 15 July 2011 - 11:08 AM

A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary


of which half may be unnecessary

at least we agree half are necessary and saving lives
less dying of heart disease

do not look at all or nothing------look for common agreements


look at the good statins have done saving lives

http://heartdisease....hdosestatin.htm

#16 stocks

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Posted 04 April 2012 - 10:16 AM

Doctor Panels Recommend Fewer Tests for Patients

In a move likely to alter treatment standards in hospitals and doctors’ offices nationwide, a group of nine medical specialty boards plans to recommend on Wednesday that doctors perform 45 common tests and procedures less often, and to urge patients to question these services if they are offered.


The recommendations represent an unusually frank acknowledgment by physicians that many profitable tests and procedures are performed unnecessarily and may harm patients. By some estimates, unnecessary treatment constitutes one-third of medical spending in the United States.

“Overuse is one of the most serious crises in American medicine,” said Dr. Lawrence Smith, physician-in-chief at North Shore-LIJ Health System and dean of the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, who was not involved in the initiative.

The list of tests and procedures they advise against includes EKGs done routinely during a physical, even when there is no sign of heart trouble, M.R.I.’s ordered whenever a patient complains of back pain, and antibiotics prescribed for mild sinusitis — all quite common.

The American College of Cardiology is urging heart specialists not to perform routine stress cardiac imaging in asymptomatic patients, and the American College of Radiology is telling radiologists not to run imaging scans on patients suffering from simple headaches. The American Gastroenterological Association is urging its physicians to prescribe the lowest doses of medication needed to control acid reflux disease.

Even oncologists are being urged to cut back on scans for patients with early stage breast and prostate cancers that are not likely to spread, and kidney disease doctors are urged not to start chronic dialysis before having a serious discussion with the patient and family.


http://www.nytimes.c...d...WAY&ei=5065
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#17 stocks

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Posted 24 April 2012 - 08:41 AM

Appendix Removal: Huge Sticker Shock in Study

It's a common, straightforward operation, so you might expect charges to be similar no matter where the surgery takes place. Yet a California study found huge disparities in patients' bills — $1,500 to $180,000, with an average of $33,000.

http://www.nytimes.c...3...rick.net


America’s false autism epidemic


Many people with the diagnosis don’t really meet the criteria for it, and the diagnosis has become so heterogeneous that it loses meaning and predictive value. This is why so many kids now outgrow their autism. They were never really autistic in the first place.

http://www.nypost.co...H94IcUB795b6f7L
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UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#18 stocks

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Posted 24 April 2012 - 09:14 AM

Unelected Bureaucrats Confiscate Your Private Medical Records Without Your Consent

Kathleen Sebelius decreed that all private health insurance companies must turn over to the federal government their medical records on all patients insured by them to be included in the federal health information database without patients’ consent.

The traditional American view is that you, the patient, are the owner of the information in your medical records that reside with your personal physician. You control to whom your information is released. Under the new Sebelius ruling, the government will control your medical information on federal computers in a federal database. Thus, your personal medical information is open to anyone with access to the system.


http://www.aapsonlin...te_medical_rec/
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#19 stocks

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Posted 26 June 2012 - 09:59 PM

Nortin Hadler says he would sue any doctor who tried to test his cholesterol. Likewise, his bone density, prostate levels, colon cells, etc. The Harvard-trained doc, now in his sixties and a rheumatologist and professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says you, too, should avoid these routine tests, as well as most angioplasties, bypass surgeries and routine mammograms. That's because -- contrary to what the medical establishment tells you -- the tests and procedures don't extend most lives, he says; they just convince healthy people they're sick

The Patient Paradox: A world where patients have been turned into customers, and clinics and waiting rooms are jammed with healthy people

A world where pharmaceutical companies gloss over research they don’t like and charities often use dubious science and dodgy PR to ’raise awareness’ of their disease, leaving a legacy of misinformation in their wake.

Explaining the truth behind the screening statistics and investigating the evidence behind the hype, Margaret McCartney, an award-winning writer and doctor, argues that this patient paradox – too much testing of well people and not enough care for the sick – worsens health inequalities and drains professionalism, harming both those who need treatment and those who don’t.

Screening can do more harm than good – but how many people know that when they sign up for breast screening or a cholesterol check? The Patient Paradox argues that screening tests – both in the NHS and private sector – are overhyped and oversold.
This book calls for patients, doctors and policy makers to look at the damage being caused as doctors have become deprofessionalised and patients have been turned into customers.


http://evenstarsexpl...health/#respond
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#20 Rogerdodger

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Posted 26 June 2012 - 10:17 PM

Thus, your personal medical information is open to anyone with access to the system.


I thought the whole Roe v Wade abortion law was based on a woman's "right to privacy."

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion, but that right must be balanced against the state's two legitimate interests in regulating abortions: protecting prenatal life and protecting women's health. Arguing that these state interests became stronger over the course of a pregnancy, the Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the trimester of pregnancy.