By Gary Schwitzer
See Sharon Begley’s Newsweek cover story, "OneWord Can Save Your Life: No!: New research shows how some common tests
and procedures aren’t just expensive, but can do more harm than good."
Her ending:
"Many doctors don’t seem to be getting the message about
useless and harmful health care. Medicare pays them more than $100
million a year for screening colonoscopies; some 40 percent are for
people in whom they will almost certainly harm more than help.
Arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis is performed about 650,000
times a year; studies show that it, too, is no more effective than
placebo treatment, yet taxpayers and private insurers pay for it. And
although several large studies, including the Occluded Artery Trial in
2006, have shown that inserting a stent to prop open a blocked artery
more than 24 hours after a heart attack does not improve survival rates
or reduce the risk of another coronary compared with drugs alone, the
practice continues at a rate of 100,000 such procedures a year, estimate
researchers led by Dr. Judith Hochman, a cardiologist at New York
University. "We’re killing more people than we’re saving with these
procedures," says UT’s Goodwin. "It’s as simple as that."