Edited by Echo, 15 September 2012 - 01:45 PM.
Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates
#31
Posted 15 September 2012 - 01:38 PM
#32
Posted 16 November 2012 - 08:39 AM
The consumer-driven Surgery Center of Oklahoma actually posts transparent pricing and offers deeply-discounted, payable-in-advance, cash-only medical procedures.
To understand how deeply discounted the Surgery Center’s fees are, consider that a nearby local hospital in Oklahoma City, Integris Baptist Medical Center, charges more than $33,000 for a “complex bilateral sinus procedure.” When the same surgeon performs the same surgery at the Surgery Center, the total cost is less than $6,000.
Reasons? The hospital is receiving payment from a third party (insurance company or government), and not the patient, who therefore has no incentive or reason to question or monitor the price. Another reason that the hospital charges 5 times more than the Surgery Center for the same procedure is the huge difference in administrative overhead. Reason explains:
Except for the clerical staff, every employee at the Surgery Center is directly involved in patient care. For example, both human resources and building maintenance are the responsibility of the head nurse. “One reason our prices are so low,” says Smith, “is that we don’t have administrators running around in their four or five thousand dollar suits.”
“In 2010, the top 18 administrative employees at Integris Health received an average of $413,000 in compensation, according to the not-for-profits’ 990 tax form. There are no administrative employees at the Surgery Center.”
http://www.aei-ideas...acare/#comments
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#33
Posted 04 December 2012 - 07:36 AM
The flu vaccine given to millions of people each year in Britain is “over-promoted” and “over-hyped” and the protection it offers against the seasonal illness has been exaggerated, scientists claim.
Professor Osterholm, a US public health adviser whose report “The Compelling need for game changing influenza vaccines” was published last month, said: “Our report is very comprehensive. It took three years, we reviewed 12,000 peer reviewed papers and interviewed 88 experts from around the world. We took no money from the private sector or governments – we had no conflicts of interest.
“The most striking outcome is that we have over-stated the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine. That has had a very dampening effect on the development of new vaccines.”
http://www.independe...ne-8336184.html
Edited by stocks, 04 December 2012 - 07:39 AM.
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#34
Posted 06 February 2013 - 02:09 PM
End-of-Life Medicine: Enormous Lack of Informed ConsentHow Choose to Doctors Die
It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be
The latest RadioLab podcast (“The Bitter End”) is about the dramatic difference between how doctors want to be treated when they are near death (they want no CPR, no ventilator, no dialysis, no surgery, no chemotherapy, no feeding tube, no antibiotics, nothing except pain medicine) and how the general public wants to be treated (most people want CPR, ventilator, dialysis, surgery, chemotherapy, feeding tube, antibiotics, and so on).
The RadioLab guys were puzzled by the difference. Upon investigation, they learned that the big differences exist because all those medical procedures (except pain medicine) have much worse outcomes than the public is told. The doctors know about the bad outcomes. It is better to die, the doctors decide. Unless doctors have less tolerance for being in a vegetative state, having ribs broken, and so on than the rest of us, it is clear that most people agree to these procedures because of ignorance. They fail to know what actually happens because the people who know — doctors — fail to tell them.
In other words, a huge number of sick people are being treated without having given informed consent. Doctors are doing many things to the sick people that benefit the doctors without telling the sick people how bad those things are. If end-of-life doctors told the truth, they would have a lot less work.
http://blog.sethrobe...sent/#more-9058
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#35
Posted 08 June 2013 - 02:56 AM
The New York Times has started a series called Paying Till It Hurts about high medical costs. The first installment is called “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” and is about the high cost of common procedures, such as colonoscopies, in the United States compared to other countries. (Which I blogged about quite recently.) The most extreme example is that a certain (unspecified) amount of lipitor costs $124 in the United States and $6 in New Zealand. Other treatments that cost much more in the United States include hip replacements and MRI scans.
This series might be a turning point, leading to government regulation of what health care providers can charge, which is how other countries control health care costs. To read the huge number of comments (already > 1000) is to see the suffering caused by these prices. One comment: “An acne medication was over $550 for a small tube of ointment. The [prescribing] Dr. had no idea it was that expensive.”
http://blog.sethrobe...-bill/#comments
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#36
Posted 01 January 2014 - 04:15 PM
The last sixty years have produced a mountain of anti-tonsillectomy evidence that doctors seem to ignore
If you search "tonsillectomy/adverse effects" on PubMed, you will get more than 1000 references:
including polio, weight gain, vomiting (many articles), taste distortion (here, here, here), Hodgkin's disease (here, here, here, here, here, but here is evidence that disputes the association), Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (e.g., here, here), inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, severe spine infection, neck infection (here, here), speech problems (here, here), hearing loss, ear pain, visual loss (here, here), depression, several other serious problems, and immunological abnormalities (e.g., here, here, here).
Also tonsillectomy "is associated with a relatively high risk of postoperative complications" and that "the actual post-tonsillectomy haemorrhage rate is much higher than that recorded in hospital statistics."
Overtreatment -- wasteful and harmful medicine -- is an enormous problem. It is the subject of two recent books (Overtreated and Overdiagnosed) and a Newsweek article. Tonsillectomies are an example.
link
Oakland Girl Brain Dead After Routine Tonsil Surgery
No doubt her parents were not told (1) your tonsils are part of your immune system, an essential part of your body, and (2) tonsil removal is associated with a 50% higher death rate.
http://sfist.com/201...after_routi.php
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#37
Posted 07 January 2014 - 03:19 PM
Others, though, suggested a less drastic approach, proposing that one could instead treat this “intestinal putrefaction” by changing the intestinal flora. Indeed, over a century ago there were reports of successfully treating psychiatric illnesses like depression with a dietary regimen that included probiotics. Doctors perceived a connection between depression and “feces deficient in quantity and moisture and very offensive in odor.” Reportedly, after the probiotic regimen not only did people feel better psychologically, but they had their “feces increase in quantity, become softer, and of regular consistency, and the offensive smell diminish….” Concurrent with the probiotics, however, all patients were started on a vegetarian diet—so it may not have been the probiotics at all.
Tons of nutrition facts here, mostly whole food plant based. Avoid the animal excretions like eggs and cows milk.
http://nutritionfacts.org/
#38
Posted 22 June 2014 - 07:13 AM
What Causes Disease?
For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life
For example, it is likely that the mid-twentieth century epidemic of heart disease was caused by some infectious agent - not known;
As well as the damage from micro-organisms and parasites, there are problems with the body's 'immune' reactions to these invaders - and these probably cause another whole set of 'autoimmune' diseases; which may include eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis
What about Diet?
It seems that humans can live a full lifespan on a huge range of diets, so long as the food does not contain too much poisonous or infectious stuff.
The most striking thing about diet is how little dietary components matter to life expectancy, so long as there is enough food.
http://charltonteach...s-of-thing.html
Doctors Without Borders: Ebola virus is “totally out of control” in West Africa
http://legalinsurrec...in-west-africa/
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#39
Posted 07 July 2014 - 08:46 AM
Our unrealistic views of death, through a doctor’s eyesEnd-of-Life Medicine: Enormous Lack of Informed ConsentHow Choose to Doctors Die
It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be
The latest RadioLab podcast (“The Bitter End”) is about the dramatic difference between how doctors want to be treated when they are near death (they want no CPR, no ventilator, no dialysis, no surgery, no chemotherapy, no feeding tube, no antibiotics, nothing except pain medicine) and how the general public wants to be treated (most people want CPR, ventilator, dialysis, surgery, chemotherapy, feeding tube, antibiotics, and so on).
http://blog.sethrobe...sent/#more-9058
With unrealistic expectations of our ability to prolong life, with death as an unfamiliar and unnatural event, and without a realistic, tactile sense of how much a worn-out elderly patient is suffering, it’s easy for patients and families to keep insisting on more tests, more medications, more procedures.
If a person living in 1900 managed to survive childhood and childbearing, she had a good chance of growing old. A person who made it to 65 in 1900 could expect to live an average of 12 more years; if she made it to 85, she could expect to go another four years. In 2007, a 65-year-old American could expect to live, on average, another 19 years; if he made it to 85, he could expect to go another six years.
Unrealistic expectations of modern medicine’s power to prolong life is fueled by the dramatic increase in the American life span over the past century. To hear that the average U.S. life expectancy was 47 years in 1900 and 78 years as of 2007, you might conclude that there weren’t a lot of old people in the old days — and that modern medicine invented old age. But average life expectancy is heavily skewed by childhood deaths, and infant mortality rates were high back then. In 1900, the U.S. infant mortality rate was approximately 100 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. In 2000, the rate was 6.89 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
The bulk of that decline came in the first half of the century, from simple public health measures such as improved sanitation and nutrition, not open heart surgery, MRIs or sophisticated medicines.
http://www.washingto...pm_opinions_pop
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
#40
Posted 18 September 2014 - 03:37 AM
What Causes Disease?
For humans, as large complex animals, invasion and colonisation by infectious parasitic agents is the basic problem in life
For example, it is likely that the mid-twentieth century epidemic of heart disease was caused by some infectious agent - not known;
As well as the damage from micro-organisms and parasites, there are problems with the body's 'immune' reactions to these invaders - and these probably cause another whole set of 'autoimmune' diseases; which may include eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis
Doctors Without Borders: Ebola virus is “totally out of control” in West Africa
Cases of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) are exploding all across the country with nearly 20 states reporting dozens of cases. The outbreaks are growing so quickly that the Centers for Disease Control are lagging far behind announced cases.
http://www.breitbart...us-D68-Outbreak
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change,
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.