Category Archives: True confessions

Remedial training for neurosurgeons: “Don’t bill for procedures you didn’t do!”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Dr. Vishal James Makker is an Oregon neurosurgeon with movie star good looks, a bedside manner that’s been described as “charming”, and a distressingly questionable track record for performing multiple spinal operations on his patients. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists at ProPublica have revealed that an analysis of Medicare data shows that Makker had the highest rate of repeat surgeries in the U.S. -  a rate that’s nearly 10 times the national average.  Continue reading →

“You can lead a cardiologist to water but, apparently, you cannot make him drink”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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When it comes to interventional cardiology – that’s using balloon angioplasty* and metal stents to open up blocked coronary arteries – it seems that medical evidence is still taking a back seat to doctors’ deeply ingrained practice patterns. Case in point, a warning from the health journalism watchdogs at Health Beat:

“Even though many well-designed clinical studies conclude that drug therapy alone can reduce the risk of heart attack and death in people with stable coronary artery disease just as well as more expensive invasive procedures, many cardiologists continue to use interventions like propping open blocked arteries with costly stents instead of first trying medication.”

Or, as the Los Angeles Times put it recently in a piece called Cardiologists Rush to Angioplasty Despite Evidence for Value of Drugs:

“You can lead a cardiologist to water but, apparently, you cannot make him drink.”  Continue reading →

“Integrity in Science” – who’s paying the piper?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Looking for a luscious way to noodle away an hour this weekend? Check out the Center for Science in the Public Interest and their Integrity In Science conflict-of-interest project. But before you back away slowly for something more exciting like organizing the sock drawer, consider this: there is strong evidence that researchers’ financial ties to chemical, pharmaceutical, or tobacco manufacturers directly influence their published positions in supporting the benefit or downplaying the harm of the manufacturers’ product.

In other words, as a heart attack survivor whose doctor has prescribed a fistful of meds, I have no clue which of those drugs has been recommended based on flawed research or tainted journal papers that have essentially been bought and paid for by the drug company who made them. And, worse,  neither do my doctors.

So to check who’s taking money from whom, you can now visit the Integrity in Science database and find out for yourself.   Continue reading →

Seattle report claims: “Admitting medical errors is not always the best policy”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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Five years ago, a medical laboratory in Canada made a series of catastrophic mistakes. Lab tests misdiagnosed the estrogen receptor status of almost 400 Newfoundland women with breast cancer - a potentially deadly error because women who are estrogen receptor positive must receive different cancer treatments than women who are ER negative. But it wasn’t until two years later, after the CBC and other national media across Canada ran stories revealing this disturbingly high rate of errors, that the provincial government finally ordered a commission of inquiry to get at the truth. Of those wrongly tested and thus wrongly treated women, 100 are now dead.

Fifty of the women, some of whom had undergone mastectomies, had been told they had advanced breast cancer when they did not.   Continue reading →