Melody Petersen
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 There is a federal law that requires insurance companies to report settlements in malpractice cases to a federally funded data bank, but the public has little access to this information. Many hospitals have avoided even this reporting requirement by removing the doctor's name from the malpractice lawsuit. This secrecy is systemic, and it works to protect bad doctors and bad drugs, just as today's medical industry has shown it prefers.
But there is one system, woefully underfunded and weak, that collects deaths and injuries from prescription drugs. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 They overtreat patients out of a desire to help even when they don't know the right thing to do. malpractice fears drive defensive medicine, and then there is medical custom, which varies from region to region of the United States. But the most powerful reason doctors and hospitals overtreat is that most of them are paid for how much care they deliver, not how well they care for their patients. They get paid more for doing more. This simple fact has led not only to overtreatment but also to the profound disorder of the American health care system. |
Anne Harrington
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 Buchholz said he had simply been trying to tell his colleagues that good clinical practice required more than doling out drugs and avoiding malpractice suits. It was a good moral point to make, but it seemed to have gotten lost in the eagerness to take a different, more literal message from the story. This was a story, it seemed, that was too good not to be true.2 When I recounted the story of the two oncologists to a large class of Harvard undergraduates and asked how many of them believed it, virtually all the students raised their hands. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| We also pay more than other countries for everything from malpractice to drugs to doctors. In a famous paper titled "It's the Price, Stupid," three health care policy analysts and an economist point out that the number of doctors per capita is lower in the United States than the median number in the rest of the developed world, but our doctors have much higher incomes. The average American specialist earns $274,000 a year, and the average general practitioner makes $173,000, amounts that are, respectively, 6.6 and 4.2 times the income of the average patient. |
Bill Sardi
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 Oakley Jr, of Emory University, characterizes the foot dragging by public health authorities to fortify the diet with more folic acid as "public health malpractice." [Teratology 66: 44-54, 2002]
Does folic acid promote cancer?
There is a paradox in regard to folic acid and cancer. While, folic acid reduces the risk for cancer to develop within the colon, supplementation has the effect of promoting the progression of established colon tumors. [Journal Nutrition 133: 3731-39s, 2003] This is why the first anti-cancer drugs were designed to interfere with folic acid. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Failure to act this year on the strongest possible bill, when more than 80 pecent of Americans agree that Congress should do whatever is necessary to ensure drug safety, would equate to gross legislative malpractice."
Most Americans agree with NewsTarget
What's really interesting about these results is that they show most Americans agree with NewsTarget on issues like drug advertising, ending conflicts of interest at the FDA, requiring all clinical trials to be published, and other similar topics covered in this survey. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Cries for lower malpractice insurance rates and liability limits... definitely. Devaluation of human life...unquestionably.
• The government is the largest single purchaser of pharmaceuticals from Canada. (This includes purchases for the Veterans Administration and the military.) We have already shown that the FDA does not guarantee safe drug supplies. Perhaps individual patients should, like the federal government, be able to purchase drugs from the lowest bidder.
• The government is the largest polluter and violator of its own regulations. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| I also discovered along the way that most of the solutions to our various health care crises—consumer-driven care, malpractice reform, universal coverage, pay for performance, electronic medical records—only nibble around the edges of fixing the system. None of them can remedy the poor quality of American health care unless we simultaneously address the issue of overtreatment.
Yet in politics, overtreatment is routinely left out of any discussion of health care reform. That's partly because getting rid of it smacks of rationing. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| Nearly 1 million deaths result from this malpractice annually.88
• Every year, up to 20 million people are unnecessarily prescribed antibiotics.89
• "The American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury at nearly 800,000 in the US. By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251."'
• "About 1,500 companies in the US manufacture and market medicinal drugs, with combined annual US revenue over $200 billion."9'
• "US health care spending reached $1. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| However, while all of these factors—wasteful bureaucratic overhead, malpractice, moral hazard, and high prices—contribute to the high cost of American medicine, throughout the political debate over our health care mess, the most important piece of the puzzle has been consistently overlooked. There's one more factor that contributes to our medical bills, and that's unnecessary care. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Particularly in the United States, where insurance fees for malpractice are exorbitant, physicians are increasingly interested in attending to their patients' spiritual needs. By building more personal relationships with their patients, a doctor lowers his risk of litigation considerably. This may also restore the doctor's image as an infallible caretaker, a role that used to be the rule rather than the exception. The doctor's role as a friend and guide during the difficult times of sickness can, in fact, be a very crucial element in leading a patient to recovery. |
| In 1976, Los Angeles County registered a sudden reduction of its death rate by eighteen percent when many medical doctors went on strike against the increase of health insurance premiums for malpractice. In a study by Dr. Milton Roemer from the University of California, Los Angeles, 17 of the largest hospitals in the county showed a total of 60 percent fewer operations during the period of the strike. When the doctors resumed work and medical activities went back to normal, death rates also returned to pre-strike levels.
A similar event took place in Israel in 1973. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 There were risks, particularly bile duct injuries, malpractice claims for which increased fivefold.31
Enthusiasm for this surgery lowered the threshold for the operation, which resulted in a 22 % increase in the procedure. With more persons now having the surgery, the "total number of gall bladder related deaths in the population either stayed the same or, in some regions, increased by over 10%. |
| In the 1960s and 1970s, the concept became a product of malpractice case law, with assistance from consumer and women's health care social movements. Litigants were winning lawsuits against physicians for surgical procedures that were deemed by a jury to be needless. |
| Indeed a 2003 study published in JAMA found double the false positives in the United States compared with Great Britain, a finding attributed to inferior mammogram training and fear of malpractice suits. "Very clear and specific standards and targets need to be set for interpretation of mammography," said the study's lead author. "Radiologists who perform outside acceptable ranges need to be told: 'that's not acceptable.'"37
We are not saying that a substantial proportion of physicians are incompetent. |
| It's more than embarrassing. It's malpractice," countered Fran.
There is a lesson here. In 1982, diuretics accounted for 56% of prescriptions written for blood pressure; ten years later, after ACE inhibitors were marketed, they accounted for 27%. A list of the best-selling drugs among senior citizens shows three ACE inhibitors, but no diuretics. We have replaced the inexpensive drug with an expensive one.
Third, ACE inhibitors do have a limited effect in reducing the risk of heart failure and death from strokes. |
Bill Sardi
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| The cost of malpractice insurance, in addition to poor reimbursement, means that many facilities operate mammography centers at a loss. For some, the resulting business makes up for it. Screening mammography misses about 17% of all breast cancers in women and might mistakenly label an abnormal area as a tumor where none exists. Other studies indicate the error rate could be even higher, closer to 30%. A prominent doctor likens the task of finding breast cancers on a mammogram to 'trying to find a snowstorm in a blizzard'. |
Bottom Line Health
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| In many places, the cost of malpractice insurance has forced doctors, particularly specialists, to give up their practice, he says. This trend is making it more difficult for emergency departments to get specialists to see patients in the emergency room. It also increases the burden on emergency departments, since patients who would have gone to a specialist may go to the emergency department instead, Blum explains.
In addition, many hospitals are closing their emergency departments because of financial considerations. |
Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 Knowing what I know now, withholding information about these nutraceuticals would be tantamount to malpractice for me!
It was a new beginning in my practice of medicine to be able to offer my patients complementary therapies that were safe and efficient—and that truly worked. Because nutrition had not been a part of the curriculum when I went to medical school, I made time to study it at great length; however, my physician colleagues were often skeptical that I knew what I was talking about. |
Melody Petersen
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| Many hospitals have avoided even this reporting requirement by removing the doctor's name from the malpractice lawsuit. This secrecy is systemic, and it works to protect bad doctors and bad drugs, just as today's medical industry has shown it prefers.
But there is one system, woefully underfunded and weak, that collects deaths and injuries from prescription drugs. The system, called Med-Watch, runs on a voluntary basis. The government encourages doctors to file a MedWatch report whenever a patient is harmed by a drug, but there is no law requiring them to do so. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Many doctors believe malpractice is the culprit, that their worries about lawsuits drive them to practice defensive medicine. Other physicians place the blame on greedy insurance executives and the wasteful bureaucracy they have created with their multiple plans, each of which covers a different set of treatments and pays a different amount for the same treatment. We devote nearly a third of our health care spending to administrative costs—paper pushing, in effect. In 1999, that amounted to $1,000 per capita. |
| Most ER physicians know this is the right way to treat a patient with a normal neurological exam, and many are aware of the hazards of an unnecessary head CT, yet they order them anyway, they say, because juries in malpractice cases don't always pay attention to the medical evidence. In 2004, John and Robyn Sprague, of La Plata, Maryland, won a five-million-dollar judgment against their pediatrician and two doctors at a local hospital because they failed to order a head CT for the Spragues' infant son. |
Melody Petersen
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| They can be sued for malpractice if they fail to do so. But surveys of patients show that doctors often don't tell people about the dangers.
The FDA should make it easier for doctors to go over the risks and benefits of a drug with their patients. The agency could require easy-to-read brochures for every drug on the market. Doctors could download the brochures from a government website and go over the facts with the patient before the prescription was written. The brochures could be written by the same national agency that independently evaluated drugs. |
Greg Critser
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 Now add to this intense pressure from within the pressure from without: an aging population with a growing sense of medical entitlement; a younger immigrant population with severe economic and communications problems; huge spikes in malpractice insurance and a seemingly endless swarm of malpractice attorneys, ready to pounce. Being a doctor isn't so sexy anymore.
Now enter the pharma factor. In 2005, Dr. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Thus, you save a fortune by essentially not funding the legal fees, settlements and malpractice insurance costs normally found in a U.S.-based healthcare practice.
When you combine these two savings - the paperwork shuffling reduction and the medical malpractice lawsuits - and you get an incredible deal for your dollar.
Some people might ask, "What if something goes wrong during the surgery?" Well, here you have the reputation of the hospital and the surgeon at stake. They know that they must offer you outstanding, high-quality service. |
Greg Critser
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| They have successfully enacted laws requiring that physicians, for example, reveal malpractice settlements — one measure of physician performance. To restore fully patient-physician trust, we must extend that transparency even further. Being independent from pharmaceutical influence matters.
Now that the AMA has a surveillance camera trained on my house, let us turn to pharma itself. What can we do to make the industry more responsible? The answer, bane to every pharma-bankrolled congressman and think tank, is more independent regulation. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
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 Failure to do so, a violation of every patient's right to informed consent, is grounds for malpractice.
DEPUTY DIAGNOSTICIANS: YOU'VE GOT "ANTS IN THE PANTS"
In the vast majority of cases it is schools, with the process usually kicked off by a classroom teacher, who initiate the ADHD labeling and drugging process, not parents or physicians. Despite having no qualifications for making diagnoses or recommending drugs, they are brazen about it. |
Jonny Bowden, M.A., C.N.S.
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 While this view is not entirely without merit, it's so far from the whole picture as to almost constitute dietary malpractice.
The thinking behind low-carbing belongs to the second category of theories about weight loss, the Telephone Theory. This view asks a critical question: what goes on inside the body once those calories are taken in? Why do some people store everything as fat and others don't? What determines whether what you eat goes on your hips or is burned up as energy and disappears as heat into the atmosphere?
The answer is one word: hormones. |
| Jovanovic sums up the conventional high-carb advice for diabetics in one word: "Malpractice!"
Can Stress Stall Weight Loss?
You bet. Not only can stress stall weight loss, it can reverse it. Stress—which can come from lack of sleep, extremely low-calorie dieting, and, of course, from life itself—causes the release of hormones such as Cortisol and adrenaline. These stress hormones send messages to the body to break down muscle for fuel, resulting in a lower metabolic rate. They send compelling messages to the brain to eat (i.e., the well-known "stress eating" phenomenon). |
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