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Unnecessary Medical Procedures and the Dangers of Robot Surgery
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that in a new report aimed at improving healthcare and controlling runaway costs, a coalition of leading medical societies has identified nearly 100 medical procedures, tests and therapies that are overused and often unnecessary. The medical interventions — including early cesarean deliveries, CT scans for head injuries in children and annual Pap tests for middle-aged women — may be necessary in some cases, but are often not beneficial and may even cause harm. 'We are very concerned about the rapidly escalating cost of healthcare,' says Dr. Bruce Sigsbee. 'This is not healthy for the country, and something has to be done.' Each of the specialty medical societies has provided a list of five procedures that physicians and patients should question about the overuse of medical tests and procedures that provide little benefit and in some cases harm. A 2012 report from the independent Institute of Medicine estimated total waste in the system at 30%, or $750 billion a year. 'Millions of Americans are increasingly realizing that when it comes to healthcare, more is not necessarily better,' says Dr. Christine K. Cassel." According to pigrabbitbear, it's the robots we should be wary of. He writes "'We are committed to helping victims of robot surgery receive the medical care and compensation they deserve. As both a lawyer and a licensed medical doctor, Dr. Francois Blaudeau has made it his mission to fight for the victims of traumatic complications as a result of botched robot surgery.' That's the opening salvo from the medical malpractice lawyers who run the slick fear factory of a website, BadRobotSurgery.com. According to the doctor-lawyers behind it—doctor-lawyers like Francois Blaudeau, MD, JD, FACHE, FCLM—'thousands of people have suffered severe and critical complications at the hands of surgical robots. In fact, 'robotic surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.'
Slashdot editors aren't paid by the number of posts.
Why are these two unrelated topics in a single post? The word 'robot' does not even occur in any of the 'Unnecessary Medical Procedures' articles (does using 'find' count as RTFA'ing?)
It's worrying about the wrong thing. Millions of people have suffered severe and critical complications at the hands of human surgeons. In fact, 'human surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.' /sarcasm
Human surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.
And I think many more such cases overall than for robot surgery. Horror stories can be found always, just a matter of searching hard enough.
The question is: which one is more reliable overall?
Did I miss the future?
robot /rbät/
Noun
1 A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.
2 (esp. in science fiction) A machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions.
I think they are confusing tele-medicine with surgical robots.
With this "robot surgery" is it 2060 or just April first?
Remote control surgery via endoscope, lapriscope or whatever has a human being driving a tool. There are no droids to be looking for.
Looks like something straight out of The Onion..
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
It was never a smart idea to put our healthcare systems in the hands of for profit corporations...
It can only end one way. Badly for the consumer.
The whole insurance angle is yet another layer on top of all that too. And drives up our prices to insane levels.
The robots in robot surgery are not the same as the robots in Isaac Asimov. A DaVinci robot has no autonomy at all, but is really just telepresence, an extension of the surgeon's hands and eyes. If anything goes wrong, it is the surgeon who is ultimately at fault (baring any mechanical or electrical problems, which I don't think they are alleging).
The BadRobotSurgery.com lawyers must know this; their web site sounds like it has all of he subtlety and morality of a Karl Rove political ad campaign.
And, of course, none of this really seems to have anything to do with unnecessary ,medical procedures.
No doctor wants to be on the stand in a courtroom and get asked:
"So, if you'd just done this one easy surgery, the dear deceased might be with us today?"
Inevitably, it ends up looking like the doctor wanted to "save money" by avoiding a $100 test or $500 surgery and that's what killed poor dearly departed.
Also, an order has suppressed evidence that the dearly departed was 500 lbs and smoked 4 packs a day while eating nothing but cheesburgers with bacon.
That kills the cost curve. So does the paperwork, which has hospitals hiring more paper-pushers than doctors and nurses. All of this stuff is backward looking, designed to avoid that one moment in trial where it sounds to 12 half-awake people that maybe the rich evil doctor just didn't care enough.
Futurist Traditionalism
If they are so concerned with healthcare costs, then why is the exploding number of non-medical administrative personnel ever mentioned?
When I lived in a certain large Midwestern city the medical office I went to contained about two financial office personnel for every medical staff person.
Of course one reason is that they have to have a staff to fight the insurance companies at every turn... but no one will ever talk about that.
Yes... there are medical procedures that do not need to be done, but the problem is like so many in everyday life: there is a huge number of high end administration that don't do squat and make huge salaries.
Like many other substances, DHMO has good and bad purposes. It's essential for human life and for crop growth, so much so that most U.S. homes have a DHMO pipeline with four or more taps. Just be careful around pools where DHMO is stored, as any liquid can cause drowning.
Are those medical robots actually even robots? Do they automatically do anything? My understanding is they require a doctor to use them, so they are more like arm/eye enhancements.
I just checked wikipedia, but i don't count human controlled (remote or directly) devices robots (unless it's temporary obviously). In my book a robot needs to do something automatically.
Anyway, because doctors control these whatevers, how is it a problem with the whatevers? Unless they aren't accurate enough, the fault is in the one controlling the thing. Maybe those doctors shouldn't use those devices, if they aren't capable.
Didn't bother to read the link about the subject, because it's probably just some FUD, because they are afraid they'll be replaced by robot doctors.
I don't need to see the list to know it's not there. Where is routine infant male genital mutilation? You want to save a quick $300 bucks? And possibly thousands more as I've had to spend OUT OF MY OWN POCKET to deal with complications?
For fuck's sake.
after "According to pigrabbitbear" ... Is it just me or has the namespace of good available user / website names run out like IP4? CNN reporter floppypants456 bringing you breaking news!
Also, this smells suspiciously of manbearpig! He's real I tell you!
He went crazy and I did a lot of his research. He had TORS robotic surgery on his tonsil and tongue base. Allows surgeons to do things that they could NEVER do by hand and avoid little things like fucking splitting your jawbone in half to gain access. It allows them to get clean margins and preserve muscles used for little things like swallowing. 2 things I learned after this. #1 Don't go down on a woman unless you know her HPV status and #2 Robots are the future of surgery.
The same robots that can assemble iphones will be able to do open heart surgery.. except many, many times faster. The same cameras that provide high speed film will be able to drive high speed image recognition of what needs fixing, in multiple spectrums, in real-time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk
That is one lab in Japan, and it's several years old. The state of the art in this technology is nothing short of breathtaking. It's being driven by cheap processing time. 50 years of computer science (real computer science) on vision systems is now all coming to life.
What's the problem? Well.. it will render advanced surgeries a commodity. Doctors have egos worse than fighter pilots, and you just wait until drones and computer piloted autonomous planes start shooting down the real deal. It's over then. Doctors are not stupid people, and the smarter ones are realizing this now.
Robotic surgeries will dramatically improve life for millions of people, and while there is a development curve, they will ultimately be superior in every way, as sure as hand-milling was replaced by CNC equipment.
Exciting times we live in.
..don't panic
All Your Organs Are Belong To Us.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Same thing goes for surgeons, but a robot has two qualities that your run of the mill surgeon doesn't: It is consistent in its results (you can end up in the hands of a drunken surgeon, someone who just lost a familiar, or it just happens to have a bad day), and it is cheaper (in the long run).
Robotic surgery doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It isn't an autonomous robot doing the procedure. It is a doctor doing the procedure using robotic technology to enhance and assist. It improves capabilities for minimally invasive surgery and remote surgery but it is not what you are describing.
Automation is coming to all other aspects of life, shedding jobs at its wake. I don't see why doctors need to be protected from that, as long as automation brings some benefits to society.
Common misconception. Automation does not "shed jobs", it simply pushes the jobs elsewhere. We automated farming and that freed the labor force to work in manufacturing and services and we all have benefited greatly from that shift. Manufacturing is now being increasingly automated for many things freeing labor for more valuable tasks. A lot of work is not value added. A lot of my work is as an accountant. Theoretically I could keep the books by hand like they did before computers with large staff but that adds no economic value to what we do, just cost. Better to use Quickbooks and automate and apply that labor more productively elsewhere. The purpose of jobs is not to provide a paycheck. The purpose of jobs is to do economically useful work. If a machine can do the work more economically that labor needs to be applied elsewhere.
Doctors don't need to be protected from automation any more than anyone else. If anything they welcome the productivity improvements automation can provide, particularly on the administrative side of things. But it's pretty hard to automate a checkup or removing an appendix. We give them a lot of training because those skills are not presently replaceable with any technology we possess. Perhaps that will change someday but it won't be anytime soon.
.....and to continue to keep money flowing into thier pockets.
We as an industry have decided to provide less care for patients.
Why is an injury lawyer’s marketing campaign posted at all on Slashdot, let alone next to an unrelated LA time article? The article quoted in the second part of the post actually says exactly the opposite of what the post states. Does anybody on slashdot know what 'editor' means? What grades did the slashdot editors get on reading and comprehension on elementary school?
If they are so concerned with healthcare costs, then why is the exploding number of non-medical administrative personnel ever mentioned?
It gets mentioned a lot. Seriously. I'm married to a doctor and everyone involved is very, very, very well aware of the problem. That does not mean it is a simple problem to fix however. Electronic medical records will help a lot in the long run but getting the vast amount of very complicated paperwork and related processes automated is no trivial feat.
there is a huge number of high end administration that don't do squat and make huge salaries.
Not in medical office administration there isn't. Medical office workers get paid quite poorly for the most part.
Ineffective flu vaccines. Unnecessary surgery. Dangerous "better" robotic surgery.
Doctor, what's wrong with your field? It's as if you're just in it for the money.
In it, they report uninsured patients get charged 11x what would be allowed if the patient qualified for Medicare. It used to be health insurance companies would be able to get rates 20% to 30% over the Medicare rate. Now, because of hospital consolidation, the insurance companies are being forced to pay 5x the Medicare rate. The author wasn't able to find any actual financial reason for the markup. (Things like, $1.50 for an acetaminophen pill, when a bottle of 100 costs $1.50. Or a blood glucose test strip costing $18, when supermarkets sell them for $0.60.)
Here's the article.
From health care professional standpoint:
Blaming robots for bad surgical outcomes is like blaming PCs for a virus or an accidentally deleted system file.
Surgeons are people. People have the ability to make mistakes. If you make a mistake with your computer, you lose some photos, or trash your hard drive etc.
If you make an accidental mistake as a surgeon -- whether done open or robotically -- bad things happen to people.
Thus, just like on here people say IANAL and that you should get *good* legal advice. You should go to surgeons that a large experience. With more experience, there is less chance of bad outcomes happening.
what robots can do is achieve automation is standard settings. No two patients anatomy is exactly alike. Common wisdom in surgical culture is that any monkey or individual can do a simple surgery. That is not what you need people for. You need people for the *judgement* of what to do in certain situations. To appropriately assess and make the right medical judgement during surgery when someone's life is on the line is not something that will be done autonomously by robots.
I'm not even remotely surprised that 30% of medical advice / treatment is waste. I have to see a lot of doctors for a very weird condition I have and the amount of time they either recommend a MRI ( I've had like 7 ) or EEG ( I've had like 5 ) or another costly and redundant medical test is amazing. I even have cases where one doctor will order a MRI, EEG and SLEEP STUDY only to refer me to a doctor who will run the EXACT same tests.
/10 issue in your life lets drop it". He's right, if you can live with what you have and you don't need medical treatment then just don't get it. The human body is able to treat itself fairly well, doctors should only be called in when you body can't help, instead of the current model where you sneeze and all of a sudden need a MRI, Vaccination, Med leave from work, Clean room and Cancer tests.
Now even if I don't focus on the random testing they do which is massively overkill, they like to give me medicine like it's going out of style. I so far over the last 5 years have been switched on and off maybe 20 high power level nerve medications, all of which run a steep price tag and have a HUGE health risk attached. In some cases they will give me some super power new nerve med which will give me a new issue which they will order tests and new meds to treat!!!
I think my GP says it best 3/4 of the time, "Fuck off and shut up, If it's not causing at least a 7
Well, there are millions of robots out there; I'm sure that more than a few have had surgery. I guess that in some cases, fixing the robot you own is cheaper than buying a new one.
single player will fix that
The United States spends more than $2.5 trillion a year on healthcare, or more than $8,000 per person. That is 21/2 times as much as the average spent by other industrialized nations, according to data collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose members include the richest nations.
So is that...
...21 / 2 = 10.5 times as much?
...2 + 1/2 = 2.5 times a much?
...a Kingdom Hearts Sequel?
The superb medical insurance system in the US will keep costly surgical procedures to a minimum!
USA! USA! USA!
It's true that you don't exactly know what is going to happen to the patient when the robot has a BSOD,or the machine was too busy folding proteins in the background to maintain it's foreground responsibilities. Or maybe the robot became too concerned about the 4 laws, and had trouble deciding what was best for the patient, even though the doctor gave it instructions. Or maybe the robot becomes interested in harvesting bitcoins, or develops a passion for automated trading... Maybe the antivirus software suddenly doesn't want to run the latest stiching program because it is not whitelisted at symantec yet. Or it is spending too mich time on Facebook. :-)
Where is J.J. Abrams with the trademark infringement suit?
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
My problem is the opposite: it's not about the unnecessary stuff, it's about the cheap, non-invasive things they could do that they stay away from like if it was a transplant or something. My pregnant wife had to spend a couple of hours bleeding in the ER for a clueless resident to finally pick up the ultrasound and tell us "well, there's an apparently intact fetus with a beating heart, stuff happens, no need for a cleanup surgery, go home". They were already setting up an OR for a D&C -- what kind of an idiot does that before doing a basic ultrasound that takes 60 second start-to-finish?!
Another story: I have a solid family history (with tombstones and documented post-mortems to prove it) of plaque formation in coronary arteries, and the doofuses would drag their feet on noninvasive transthoracic ultrasounds of precisely the non-invasevely accessible parts of those arteries that were problematic in my family! I mean, come on, how stupid do you have to be.
Some guys I know decided they've had enough of bullshit and simply got an ultrasound for themselves to play with. It doesn't take 6 years of med school to do a decent doppler coronary artery exam. You simply need enough practice and access to rudimentary literature (and a modicum of intelligence). When you have the tool in your basement, you can get more hands-on time in a month than a resident gets in a year. Of course it helps if you're an engineer and can troubleshoot things and fix them when something breaks.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"annual Pap tests for middle-aged women â" may be necessary in some cases, but are often not beneficial and may even cause harm"
Does nobody here remember the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments from the feminism industry when the study expressing the above findings re: annual pap smears was published? It was not that long ago. It's probably part of the current narrative of the mythological "war on women." How dare those study results conclude that the three times more Americans spend on women's healthcare than on men's may not all be entirely necessary?!? MISOGYNY! War on womyn! Won't somebody PLEASE think of the vaginas?
And so the unnecessary spending continues, the feminism industry secures more funding to make its hysterical voice heard, and no progress is made. Thanks, feminism!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Within the foreseeable future no doctor is going to be replaced by machines. Some nurses, lab technicians and orderlies might lose their jobs to robots, but not one doctor will. Machines will simply allow for higher quality care. There is no incentive for doctors to fight robots (except possibly some irrational "when I was your age" get-off-my-lawning). The second story is purely about the work of a bunch of unethical ambulance chasing lawyers out to make a quick buck through frivolous lawsuits and FUD, not some conspiracy between doctors that are afraid their jobs will be outsourced to I Robot.
weinersmith
... one of the most common unnecessary (and harmful) medical procedures. Male circumcision.
Someone needed to be sent to the supermarket to buy that 1 glucose test strip. I can imagine the cost of person's time and commute coming upto $17.40 at least.
As industries and ideologies have competed for the consumer's dollar, they have learned that almost nothing sells better than fear. Whether it's extra medical procedures, the law-and-order candidate, more insurance or 15-round magazines, a frightened customer is a willing customer.
I am wondering who is supposed to decide what procedures are necessary? If you don't trust the doctors to do it, who do you trust? The insurance companies are the ones footing most of the bill. Let them worry about what is necessary. If they won't pay for it, many people aren't going to do it. Complaints like this ignore the real problem, which is that health insurance masks the true market costs and medical care is absurdly overpriced. If most people had to pay those prices they would seek medical care a lot less or maybe never. Most people just couldn't afford it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.