The current healthcare debate has brought up basic questions about how medicine should work. On one hand we have the medical establishment with its enormous cadre of M.D.s, medical schools, big pharma, and incredibly expensive hospital care. On the other we have the semi-condoned field of alternative medicine that attracts millions of patients a year and embraces literally thousands of treatment modalities not taught in medical school.
One side, mainstream medicine, promotes the notion that it alone should be considered "real" medicine, but more and more this claim is being exposed as an officially sanctioned myth. When scientific minds turn to tackling the complex business of healing the sick, they simultaneously warn us that it's dangerous and foolish to look at integrative medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, or God forbid, indigenous medicine for answers. Because these other modalities are enormously popular, mainstream medicine has made a few grudging concessions to the placebo effect, natural herbal remedies, and acupuncture over the years. But M.D.s are still taught that other approaches are risky and inferior to their own training; they insist, year after year, that all we need are science-based procedures and the huge spectrum of drugs upon which modern medicine depends.
If a pill or surgery won't do the trick, most patients are sent home to await their fate. There is an implied faith here that if a new drug manufacturer has paid for the research for FDA approval, then it is scientifically proven to be effective. As it turns out, this belief is by no means fully justified.
The British Medical Journal recently undertook an general analysis of common medical treatments to determine which are supported by sufficient reliable evidence. They evaluated around 2,500 treatments, and the results were as follows:
This left the largest category, 46 percent, as unknown in their effectiveness. In other words, when you take your sick child to the hospital or clinic, there is only a 36 percent chance that he will receive a treatment that has been scientifically demonstrated to be either beneficial or likely to be beneficial. This is remarkably similar to the results Dr. Brian Berman found in his analysis of completed Cochrane reviews of conventional medical practices. There, 38 percent of treatments were positive and 62 percent were negative or showed "no evidence of effect."
For those who have been paying attention, this is not news. Back in the late 70's the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment determined that a mere 10 to 20 percent of the practices and treatment used by physicians are scientifically validated. It's sobering to compare this number to the chances that a patient will receive benefit due to the placebo effect, which is between 30 percent and 50 percent, according to various studies.
We all marvel at the technological advances in materials and techniques that allow doctors to perform quadruple bypass surgeries and angioplasties without marveling that recent studies indicate that coronary bypass surgery will extend life expectancy in only about three percent of cases. For angioplasty that figure sinks to zero percent. Those numbers might be close to what you could expect from a witch doctor, one difference being that witch doctors don't submit bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.
It would be one thing if any of these unproven conventional medical treatments were cheap , but they are not. Angioplasty and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) alone cost $100 billion annually. As quoted by President Obama in his drive to bring down medical costs, $700 billion is spent annually on unnecessary tests and procedures in America. As part of this excess, it is estimated that 2.5 million unnecessary surgeries are performed each year.
Then there is the myth that this vast expenditure results in excellent health care, usually touted as the best in the world (most recently by Rush Limbaugh as he emerged from a hospital in Hawaii after suffering chest pain). But this myth has been completely undermined. In 2000 Dr. Barbara Starfield, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, estimated that between 230,000 and 284,000 deaths occur each year in the US due to iatrogenic causes, or physician error, making this number three in the leading causes of death for all Americans.
In 2005 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that out of the 2.4 billion prescriptions written by doctors annually, 118 million were for antidepressants. It is the number one prescribed medication, whose use has doubled in the last ten years. You would think, therefore, that a remarkable endorsement is being offered for the efficacy of antidepressants. The theory behind standard antidepression medication is that the disease is caused by low levels of key brain chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, and thus by manipulating those imbalanced neurotransmitters, a patient's depression will be reversed or at least alleviated.
This turns out to be another myth. Prof. Eva Redei of Northwestern University, a leading depression researcher, has discovered that depressed individuals have no depletion of the genes that produce these key neurotransmitters compared to people who are not depressed. This would help explain why an estimated 50 percent of patients don't respond to antidepressants, and why Dr. Irving Kirsch's meta-analysis of antidepressants in England showed no significant difference in effectiveness between them and placebos.
You have a right to be shocked by these findings and by the overall picture of a system that benefits far fewer patients than it claims. The sad fact is that a disturbing percentage of the medicine we subject ourselves to isn't based on hard science, and another percentage is risky or outright harmful. Obviously, every patient deserves medical care that is evidence-based, not just based on an illusory reputation that is promoted in contrast to alternative medicine.
We are not suggesting that Americans adopt any and all alternative practices simply because they are alternative. These, too, must demonstrate their effectiveness through objective testing. But alternative modalities should not be dismissed out of hand in favor of expensive and unnecessary procedures that have been shown to benefit no one absolutely except corporate stockholders.
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Also, I have one ear that has been slightly deafened since an ear doctor punctured my ear drum in order to drain a clogged up ear. I later read in a woman's magazine that the process works fine on children but usually (or always?) produces lessened hearing in adults! So much for "evidence.
Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Very foolish.
It's so ironic that there are people making comments IN THIS VERY FORUM who denigrate the work of scientists and yet ARE USING COMPUTERS to read this.
For shame, brothers and sisters, don't go back into the caves of our prehistori
http://www
Lead author Kevin Fiscella, M.D.: "Therefore
This is only the latest study drawing attention to the epidemic of vitamin D deficiency
This is also not a final study or even a firm conclusion
"Fiscella cautions, however, that not all observatio
A clinical study may provide good evidence to a raising of the suggested vitamin D intake levels for all individual
"They sense that once they admit the value of one vitamin their entire drug-cente
What you are suggesting is that vitamins alone are sufficient to cure any potential illness and replace phamaceuti
The latest I've heard is that Vitamin D tablets (made by Big Alternativ
My guess is that as the safe daily dosages of vitamin D supplement
You see real medicine is like the English language, neither of them really care where a word or idea originated --- they just start using it when it is useful.
Having been trained in the rigorous field of rocket science, I am somewhat horrified at the lack of rigor in medical research, and the pathetic level of knowledge as to how the human body really functions. They have yet to figure out the causes of any of the major chronic illnesses, and are still looking for the origins of our immune system. It is arrogance and ignorance that seems to fuel the medical-in
Primary prevention is all about avoiding the developmen
For one example of a program of primary prevention (designed by nature, not the medical community)
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www
To what chronic illnesses are you referring? And how do you define "origins of our immune system".
I do not understand your point with those statements
What kind of illnesses are you capable of preventing with "primary prevention
The primary prevention approach to health is an experiment in its infancy, and when results are available, they will be made public. Should you wish to learn more about it, ask your librarian for a copy of "The Wellness Project." Some persons with a strong sense of self may choose to participat
Speaking of confused - From my original comment, it should be obvious to you that the last thing I have an interest in doing is giving medical advice. My comment was my personal opinion on health, its relationsh
I also clearly stated that the reason I am the one commenting on and funding research in the field of primary prevention is because nobody who makes a living in the medical industry has an interest in it - no money.
On your misinforme
http://www
http://www
Professor Radei: "The medication
Treating the symptoms, not the cause: "Science-B
Also, none of those drugs can get approved with animal testing alone and would have to be tested in people in order to be approved by the FDA. Therefore, this is more of a wakeup to the pharmaceut
Depression and neuropharm
Statements like this illustrate that the authors do not understand the subject matter of the study they are quoting. No one has a "depletion of genes", depressed or otherwise. The issue is the function of the gene products or involvemen
"Redei used microarray technology to isolate and identify the specific genes related to depression in these animals. She examined the genes in the brain regions -- the hippocampu
Then she took four geneticall
Redei now had one set of depression
Next she compared the two sets of genes to see if there were any similariti
So as you can see, there are what Redei has labeled "depressio
You really should check yourself before asserting others don't know what they are talking about.
And Josephius is correct. An author trying to write about science should know that "depletion
Furthermor
They aren't, as the authors say at the end:
-"We are not suggesting that Americans adopt any and all alternativ
Has reading become a lost art?
http://sci
Ah yes, reading has indeed become a lost art.
The hippocrati
But you can certainly patent drugs derived from herbs. And even if you can't patent it, there's money to be made selling extracts of herbs. Or did you think that those thousands of pills bottles found in health 'food' stores are made and sold at cost?
And you're ignoring the role of NCCAM in the US that has funded some useful but mostly useless research. But the results of the research work only way. If the conclusion supports a herb or a supplement --- that's ok. If the conclusion doesn't support a herb or a supplement
1) Racism (ethnocent
2) Money (greed)
3) The racial consequenc
Yet, truth will out. Wisdom is rising.
No, ignorance of science and the scientific method is rising.
http://www
I am not a science denialist. I am, in fact, married to a very mainstream cardiologi
Although the study is old, the informatio
If 43% of treatment is not efficaciou
I would be interested to see the same report that the British journal did for medical treatments done for CAM treatments
duh--that'
If you read the article at :
http://sci
you would see that the authors here make several incorrect assertions about medical procedure efficacy, one even noted below by Dr. Mendelson. Given that I do not have access to the journal they are referencin
Can we get assurances from these individual