February 16, 2012
Key quotes from Reuters story on overtreatment
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 in direct-to-consumer marketing,” said Dr. Hugh Lavery, a urologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. “There’s pressure from the (hospital) administration. They’ll say, ‘We just bought this thing, why aren’t you using it?’ It’s kind of like if you buy your kid an Xbox and he doesn’t use it.”
- The American Cancer Society’s Dr. Otis Brawley said the $10 stool test for colon cancer screening has been shown to save lives, but in the United States, the $3,000 colonoscopy is mostly commonly used. “Everyone is getting the expensive test, even though the cheaper test is better. But the cheaper test involves stool and no one can make money off of it,” Brawley said.
Comments (2)
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Gregory D. Pawelski
February 16, 2012 at 3:03 pm“But the cheaper test involves stool and no one can make money off of it,” Brawley said. LOL!!!!!
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