America's Doctors Are Performing Expensive Procedures That Don't Work (vox.com)

"The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half," writes a professor of public policy at Brown University. An anonymous reader quotes his article in Vox: The recent news that stents inserted in patients with heart disease to keep arteries open work no better than a placebo ought to be shocking. Each year, hundreds of thousands of American patients receive stents for the relief of chest pain, and the cost of the procedure ranges from $11,000 to $41,000 in US hospitals. But in fact, American doctors routinely prescribe medical treatments that are not based on sound science.

The stent controversy serves as a reminder that the United States struggles when it comes to winnowing evidence-based treatments from the ineffective chaff. As surgeon and health care researcher Atul Gawande observes, "Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren't helping them, operations that aren't going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm"... Estimates vary about what fraction of the treatments provided to patients is supported by adequate evidence, but some reviews place the figure at under half.

Comments

No Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, there is no money in actually healing people. Take the profit out of medicine and it will start actually work again.

Re:No Money

[VeryFluffyBunny]

In the UK, where the NHS is the only real game in town and health insurance is a national govt. system, doctors are allocated budgets for the numbers of patients that they have enrolled on their books. It's in their interests to spend as little as possible on keeping their patients as healthy as possible in order to conserve their budgets. The NHS is one of the best health services in the world in terms of outcomes for per capita spending. Well, that's the last time I heard. The current UK right-wing* administration are doing their best to wreck it.

*right-wing in the UK is still thankfully far left of the Democrats in the USA.

Damn stupid story

[Anonymous Coward]

Stents WORK for heart disease - that’s proven and the story stupidly misleads it for click bait (and slashdot editors happily repeat)

The study in question showed that stents don’t necessarily reduce heart pain in patients with narrowed arteries which is contradictory to the theories about how heart pain/disease work.

Regardless a clogged artery will still kill you and a stent resolves that problem!

More piss poor science “reporting”

Re:Damn stupid story

[sjames]

Somebody didn't RTFA! The study was looking specifically at stents used in cases of stable angina that is responsive to medication, and found that the stents were higher risk but provided no benefit over medication in the case of stable angina. The study did not attempt to address the effectiveness of stents in other cases including cases where medication did not control stable angina.

That still represents a lot of excessive costs for no benefit.

Same thing happens in dentistry

[ravenspear]

The medical literature clearly indicates that the US is one of the few western countries remaining that routinely extracts nearly all asymptomatic wisdom teeth.

There is no medical reason why this is necessary unless the teeth are severely impacted or arranged in such a way that it is difficult to brush them.

Yet wisdom teeth extraction is a huge multibillion dollar industry for the dentistry practice in the US.