We’ve long been admirers of the Croakey blog, run by Melissa Sweet in Australia. Now Croakey has a new project called The Naked Doctor. The site says: Naked Doctor aims to encourage discussion and awareness of the opportunities to do more for health by doing less. It is a compilation of articles, books and other works that highlight overdiagnosis and overtreatment. It is a project of Dr Justin Coleman, a GP who works in Aboriginal and Torr…
BMJ editor Fiona Godlee published an editor’s note, “Overtreatment, over here,” kicking off a discussion in her journal. She begins: “How much of what we offer to patients is unnecessary? Worse still, how much harm do we do to individuals and society through overtreatment? In the 30 years since Ivan Illich wrote his seminal and, at the time, shocking book Medical Nemesis, the idea that medicine can do clinical and socie…
… treatment rates for these men were comparable to those of men with PSA scores between 4.0 and 20.0 ng/mL. The researchers wrote: “The finding that men in low-risk groups were treated intensively raises the concern of overtreatment, especially among older patients.” It’s interesting to now have some idea of how many men get conservative treatment – about 25 percent – receiving neither radical prostatectomy nor r…
The Associated Press looks at fears of lawsuits leading to overtesting in the latest of its series. Excerpt: “Fast decisions on life-and-death cases are the bread and butter of hospital emergency rooms. Nowhere do doctors face greater pressures to overtest and overtreat.” The AP now offers a multimedia interactive that allows you to scroll over body parts that have become key foci of overtesting and overtreatment. Continued congrat…
AP’s six-part series on overtreatment in U.S. health care turns to back pain and spine surgery with a great lead line, “Why did they cut on you?” It was a question a spine surgeon asked a man who came to him still in severe pain after an earlier back operation. Except: “Even though only a fraction of people with back pain are good candidates for surgery, complicated spine operations are on the rise. So is the hunt for an…
Nothing new, just good perspective in a Reuters piece, “Stemming the tide of overtreatment in U.S. healthcare.” And some great quotes. Examples: “I don’t trust professional societies to (set clinical guidelines) because that’s how they make money – by doing tests and procedures,” said MIT healthcare economist Dr. Jonathan Gruber; “When hospitals buy robots they also use them as a marketing tool…
…d while screening and treating men with detected tumours might reduce deaths specifically from prostate cancer by up to a third (at best), this would be at considerable risk of worrying overdetection and unpleasant or harmful overtreatment. Indeed, a previous trial found that to prevent one death from prostate cancer, 1,410 men would need to be screened and 48 treated. The authors believe that men should be fully informed about the potential haza…
The Associated Press, which sometimes may be viewed as only reacting to breaking news of the day, today published a timely and timeless feature explaining: “Anywhere from one-fifth to nearly one-third of the tests and treatments we get are estimated to be unnecessary, and avoidable care is costly in more ways than the bill: It may lead to dangerous side effects.” It’s timely because, on the heels of the New York Times’ cr…
The Naked Doctor, aka Justin Coleman, has a mega-wrap of recent news on excessive testing and treatment on the Croakey blog. And on the Columbia Journalism Review blog, “The Observatory,” Curtis Brainard offers a wrap view of “Nutrition Coverage Under Fire: From red meat to white rice, not enough skepticism of observational studies.“ His lead: “The incessant coverage of nutritional studies that make tenuous …
From today’s latest addition to this excellent series: “Americans increasingly are treated to death, spending more time in hospitals in their final days, trying last-ditch treatments that often buy only weeks of time, and racking up bills that have made medical care a leading cause of bankruptcies. More than 80 percent of people who die in the United States have a long, progressive illness such as cancer, heart failure or Alzheimer&…
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