Two recent newswire stories caught my attention. One article noted that there will be a significant shortage of doctors as “baby boomers” hit their 60s and 70s. The other story noted that too much health care is unnecessary and harmful.
Am I the only one who saw a contradiction here?
The second story, sent to newspapers by the Associated Press, noted that “More medical care won’t necessarily make you healthier—it may make you sicker.” The article went on to report that as many as one in three medical tests and treatments aren’t needed.
Fewer medical tests might not be a popular idea among people who keep asking their doctors to identify the cause and then to treat their aches and pains and other health problems. But I would agree, at least to an extent – conventional medical tests and treatments are overused, while nutritional assessments and treatments are sorely underutilized.
In the United States, medicine is a “for profit” business, and most doctors earn a living through some sort of intervention, such as by prescribing a drug or doing surgery. When a patient asks for help, his expectation is that the doctor will do something. Of course, doctors are trained to intervene, and income is related to ordering more tests and doing more interventions. Sometimes the result is iatrogenic disease – physician-caused illness.
Although I believe most doctors are sincere and do want to help their patients, they also know the economic realities of medicine. But not everyone is so sincere. Some years back, I happened to be meeting with a hospital administrator on the morning the government announced that it was reducing Medicare payments to doctors. The administrator was livid. “Do you know what the doctors are going to do?” she asked rhetorically. “They’ve got big mortgages and boats and kids in college. They’re just going to wheel in more patients so they (the docs) don’t have to take a cut in income.”
So, do we really need more doctors? Or unnecessary tests and treatments? Or do we need more doctors who think in terms of more efficient and lower cost nutritional therapies?
Showing posts with label hospitals doctors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hospitals doctors. Show all posts
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Hospitals Are Some of the Most Dangerous Places
Ads touting the benefits of particular hospitals are common in big city newspapers, but on a recent day, I was struck by the sheer number of full-page ads for hospitals. In particular, one ad read: “For a healthy heart...eat properly, exercise daily and visit St. Francis, the hospital with more of the best cardiac specialists than any other hospital...”
What do hospitals have to do with disease prevention? Virtually nothing.
Visit St. Francis or any other hospital? Unless you need the ER, you may very well be putting your life at risk.
Years ago, while researching an article on the Navajo reservation, I learned that Native Americans had a specific word for hospitals – it translated to “the place where people go to die.”
The truth is that hospitals are among of the most dangerous places in our modern world, and you would do your best to stay out of hospitals. They’re a great place to contract “nosocomial infections,” a euphemism for infections contracted in hospitals. This doesn’t mean that hospitals and surgery don’t help a lot of people. They do, but there are serious downsides – e.g., death – while being hospitalized.
It turns out that whenever physicians go on either a strike or a work slowdown, the area’s death rate decreases.
I’m serious.
When physicians began a major work slowdown in Israel in 2000, the death rate decreased by 68 percent. When Israeli doctors went on strike for a month in 1973, the death rate during that month dropped by 50 percent. No one had seen such a dramatic decrease in death rates since the previous doctors’ strike 20 years before.
In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike to protest increases in malpractice insurance. You guessed it – the death rate decreased by 18 percent. That same year, doctors in Bogota, Columbia, also went on strike, and the death rate went down by 35 percent.
These aren't the ravings of a lunatic, believe me. Even the British Medical Journal has reported these amazing reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike and disrupt the treatment of people in hospitals.
The risk of death in hospitals also seems to relate to the magnitude of intervention, with more aggres-sive interventions increasing the odds of dying. In a recent study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients were more likely to die when treated entirely by critical-care physicians in intensive care units (ICUs), compared with patients treated entirely by noncritical-care physicians. You might argue that patients in ICUs are more seriously ill, but the researchers accounted for these differences in the severity of illness.
The problem lies with the pharmaceutical and surgical interventions that lie at the heart of modern medicine. Aggressive interventions are dangerous – and deadly – compared with more conservative therapies, such as nutritional medicine, especially for chronic diseases. Going to a hospital invites such interventions, and doctors often forget their Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm.
References: Siegel-Itzkovich J. BMJ, 2000;320:1561. Mendelsohn RS. Confessions of a Medical Heretic. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979:114. Levy MM. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2008;148:801-809.
What do hospitals have to do with disease prevention? Virtually nothing.
Visit St. Francis or any other hospital? Unless you need the ER, you may very well be putting your life at risk.
Years ago, while researching an article on the Navajo reservation, I learned that Native Americans had a specific word for hospitals – it translated to “the place where people go to die.”
The truth is that hospitals are among of the most dangerous places in our modern world, and you would do your best to stay out of hospitals. They’re a great place to contract “nosocomial infections,” a euphemism for infections contracted in hospitals. This doesn’t mean that hospitals and surgery don’t help a lot of people. They do, but there are serious downsides – e.g., death – while being hospitalized.
It turns out that whenever physicians go on either a strike or a work slowdown, the area’s death rate decreases.
I’m serious.
When physicians began a major work slowdown in Israel in 2000, the death rate decreased by 68 percent. When Israeli doctors went on strike for a month in 1973, the death rate during that month dropped by 50 percent. No one had seen such a dramatic decrease in death rates since the previous doctors’ strike 20 years before.
In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike to protest increases in malpractice insurance. You guessed it – the death rate decreased by 18 percent. That same year, doctors in Bogota, Columbia, also went on strike, and the death rate went down by 35 percent.
These aren't the ravings of a lunatic, believe me. Even the British Medical Journal has reported these amazing reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike and disrupt the treatment of people in hospitals.
The risk of death in hospitals also seems to relate to the magnitude of intervention, with more aggres-sive interventions increasing the odds of dying. In a recent study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients were more likely to die when treated entirely by critical-care physicians in intensive care units (ICUs), compared with patients treated entirely by noncritical-care physicians. You might argue that patients in ICUs are more seriously ill, but the researchers accounted for these differences in the severity of illness.
The problem lies with the pharmaceutical and surgical interventions that lie at the heart of modern medicine. Aggressive interventions are dangerous – and deadly – compared with more conservative therapies, such as nutritional medicine, especially for chronic diseases. Going to a hospital invites such interventions, and doctors often forget their Hippocratic Oath: first do no harm.
References: Siegel-Itzkovich J. BMJ, 2000;320:1561. Mendelsohn RS. Confessions of a Medical Heretic. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979:114. Levy MM. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2008;148:801-809.
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