Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates

I can't speak for the last three, but I can for stents. It was difficult to actually read the article as a big ad for some health spa kept popping up, lol. So not exactly a great scientific site. Any hoo, the argument that stents are ineffective but implanted anyway is grossly misleading. It is true that stents in stable patients have never been shown to save lives. But that is not why they are implanted. They are implanted to relieve chest pain (angina) or ischemia (inadequate blood flow) the latter of which can be without symptoms of chest pain, but nontheless dangerous in increasing the risk of arrhythmias as well as decreasing the quality of life. Doing the procedure in the same setting as the diagnostic cath is actually preferred by patients who trust their cardiologists to do the right thing. Who would want to go through the same procedure twice if they have a 90% blockage that is causing symptoms or ischemia. The idea of doing lifestyle changes is advocated in all patients who get stents to prevent further worsening of lesser blockages as nearly all patients who get a stent for a 75% or greater blockage also have numerous smaller blockages in all of the arteries of the heart that could progress without good prevention. But all the good diet and exercise efforts won't change a 90% blockage that is causing chest pain or ischemia anytime soon. An appropriately placed stent relieves the problem instantly, giving the patient time and less risk to do good diet and exercise for future prevention. Do you really want to start a rigorous exercise program with a high grade blockage in the coronary artery, getting active chest pain or ischemic arrhythmias and possible sudden death each time you get up to more than 2.5 mph? The article is simply misleading. But it does apply to inappropriately placed stents where the blockage is NOT severe and there is no symptom and no abnormality on a nuclear stress test. Unfortunately, that does happen as some doctors make poor decisions. Just like any other profession. There are a few bad apples. Fortunately not a lot. But to give comfort to those reading this and concerned, there is a nationwide movement to require blockages to be at least 70% stenosed or show abnormalities on a stress test in order for stenting to be allowed in the cath labs of hospitals. Those not meeting these requirements are getting reviewed and doctors will have to answer for the outliers. I'm just curious, stocks, do you ever say anything positive about doctors or the medical profession? It seems to be 100% negative, whistle-blowing, conspiracy theory type stuff. How about a positive post once in awhile! At least try to appear as though you are fair, open-minded, and unbiased, lol. Doc

Edited by Echo, 15 September 2012 - 01:45 PM.

Market-based, low overhead medical care with transparent pricing

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

Scientists urge ministers: tell truth on 'over-hyped' flu vaccine

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.

How Choose to Doctors Die

It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be

End-of-Life Medicine: Enormous Lack of Informed Consent

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

“The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill”

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

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

Before Thorazine was invented in 1950, mental illness was often treated surgically. In fact, in 1949 the inventor of the lobotomy was awarded the Nobel Prize. Before tens of thousands were lobotomized, however, colectomy was all the rage. There was a theory that bad bacteria in the gut­ was the cause of mental illness. So the cure was to surgically remove the colon. Yes, the surgery killed about one in three–but when they didn’t die, surgeons claimed positive results. Some, for example, bragged that when they resected the colons of schoolchildren as a preventive measure there was a cessation of “abnormal sex practices” like masturbation (which was viewed at the time as a precursor for mental illness later in life). Reminds me of the mastectomies they used to perform for menstrual breast pain (Plant-Based Diets For Breast Pain).

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/

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/

How Choose to Doctors Die

It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be

End-of-Life Medicine: Enormous Lack of Informed Consent

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

Our unrealistic views of death, through a doctor’s eyes

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

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