Shannon Brownlee
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 The case for encouraging the flow of medical technology has been made time and again in scholarly papers, and it is an argument that carries enormous weight when it comes time for Congress to make decisions about what Medicare will and will not pay for.
Yet the view that all new medical technology is worth the price is often at odds with the evidence—and no more so than in the field of imaging. Payments for physician services by Medicare and Medicaid rose 31 percent between 1999 and 2004. |
Bill Sardi
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 In our culture, we have a unique, almost religious, faith in medical technology," says Diane Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. More patients are opting for no care rather than being tethered to a machine in their last days, she says.
Unanticipated survival can be treacherous. Failure to die poses problems. What is prompting gripes and distress is that terminal cancer patients enter hospice care when their prognosis is six months or less. Patients get kicked out of hospice if they lave past a predetermined point. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 We spend more on health care than anyone, we pay the highest prices for medications, and we're constantly told that we have the best medical technology in the world. But if our health care system is really so good, why do 50 million Americans have no health insurance? Why are hospitals literally dumping uninsured patients on the street, abandoning the sick to protect profits while our politicians actually negotiate on behalf of Big Pharma to make sure Americans keep paying the highest prices in the world for medications? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Tongue diagnosis is extremely advanced, amazingly accurate and is a medical technology that has been developed and improved for nearly 5,000 years. In fact, an experienced Chinese Medicine doctor can tell more from your tongue and pulse than a Western doctor can tell from $10,000 worth of blood tests and an MRI. (No kidding. |
Lynne McTaggart
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 In time, he managed to convince the Russian Ministry of Health of the importance of his invention to medical technology, diagnosis, and treatment. His equipment was initially employed to predict certain clinical situations, such as the progress of recovery of people after surgery.27 It soon became widely used in Russia as a diagnostic tool for many illnesses, including cancer and stress,28 and was even used to assess athletic potential—to predict the psychophysical reserves in athletes training for the Olympics and the likelihood of victory or exhaustion from overtraining. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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 Today, this is an extremely valuable body of experiential knowledge that describes the successful clinical use of herbal medicines in a time without antibiotics or the advances of modern medical technology.
Naturopathic medicine (which includes the use of botanicals) shares some historical roots with Eclectic medicine and today integrates traditional natural therapeutic agents with modern scientific medical diagnoses.
From the 1920s into the 1960s, the United States entered into a period of time that could be called the "herbal Dark Ages. |
Andreas Moritz
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 If the body's healing response remains absent, not even the most advanced medical technology or expertise will have any value.
3. The placebo effect triggers the healing response.
Orthodox medicine originally defined the placebo as an inert substance that, for psychological reasons only, is administered to satisfy or please a patient. However, this definition is no longer considered accurate or sufficient. The placebo effect can occur as a result of administering substances that are not inert, just as much as it can be triggered by procedures or pills that do not include medication. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 In the wise book, Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas—dean of medical schools at Yale and New York University and, at the time of his death, CEO of the Sloan-Kettering Institute—claimed that most medical technology is "so effective that it seems to attract the least public notice; it has come to be taken for granted."32
Though in this book we argue the opposite, there is surely some truth to Thomas' statement.
For example, approximately 38,000 units of blood are transfused daily. |
Bill Sardi
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| The American Cancer Society says: "Regular checkups and today's medical technology can detect all cancer early. Routine screening has clearly led to an impressive decrease in deaths from several cancers, including cervical, breast and colon cancers. Although regular medical care can indeed increase your ability to detect cancer early, it can't guarantee it."
This statement is misleading. |
| An oral drug that shows the same effectiveness as an injectable would be a huge home run," says John McCamant, executive editor of the medical technology Stock Letter.
Four other pharmaceutical companies in early stages of development of p38 blockers include Vertex Pharmaceuticals,
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Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Sankyo and ArQule. The chief financial officer of SCIOS says: "This is a very tight race. We don't intend to be second." [Reuters, Jan 7, 2002]
Advancing age increases the production of the p38 kinase inflammatory enzymes. |
Devra Davis
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 This work exposed the soft underbelly of medical technology. There is little proof that a large part of the $2 trillion we spend every year on medicine actually does what we think it will—and lots of reason to think that it doesn't. A revolution in looking at medicine has begun, fueled by these unrelenting analyses.
Whether a parallel revolution can demand the creation of full and fair evidence on environmental hazards is not at all certain. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| They argue that medical technology like the LightSpeedVCT may be expensive in the short run, but it would be foolish to impede the flow of such devices into the marketplace, because they improve the practice of medicine. (Besides, new devices and drugs means new jobs for people in the device industry and health care, and new jobs are good for the economy. |
| Yet the view that all new medical technology is worth the price is often at odds with the evidence—and no more so than in the field of imaging. Payments for physician services by Medicare and Medicaid rose 31 percent between 1999 and 2004. During that same period, payments for imaging services grew more than 60 percent, twice as fast, largely because physicians ordered more images per patient and more expensive images. Payments for MRI, for example, grew 140 percent; CT payments went up 1 12 percent. |
| These days, utilization rates of all kinds of imaging tests—MRIs, ultrasounds, PETs—are going up faster than those of any other medical technology. The use of images is rising in lockstep with the supply of increasingly sophisticated imaging machines—without much evidence that they are helping patients. The only imaging test whose rate of use is going down is the lowly X-ray.
The next case on the screen is a chest X-ray of a forty-eight-year-old man with a history of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. In other words, he has a weak spot in the wall of his aorta. |
Ron Garner
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 By the time medical technology can identify its presence, the disease condition is well advanced.
Our mind is where we should begin the process of making changes in our lives. We must be willing to view life and ourselves in new ways to recover from a disease process. This takes courage. A sincere desire for change allows this to happen. |
| One would expect that, with its ranking in medical technology near the top of all nations, the U.S. would place among the best in the health of its citizens. Unfortunately, this is not the case. According to the jama article, the U.S. ranked on average, from seventh to thirteenth among nations of the world for 16 health indicators, ranging from birth problems through to life expectancy. The year 2000 World Health Organization report ranked the U.S. twenty-fourth in health-expectancy among nations of the world despite it being the most prosperous. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| In fact, maybe the real problem with prescription drugs, and indeed with medical technology in general, is not so much that they cost too much or that they're too dangerous or that they don't always work the way they're supposed to. Maybe the real problem is there's too little of the right kind of information.
Drug reps
Doctors have three main sources of information about medical products: sales representatives, other doctors, and medical journals. All three of those sources provide some good data, and a lot of misinformation. |
Dawson Church
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 Science will be welcomed as the ally of holistic approaches, rather than merely a tool of drug companies and medical technology manufacturers. Doctors and patients may routinely pray together, and pray for each other. Patients' mental, emotional, and spiritual states may receive as much of a workup as their bodies, if not more so, and intention and other intangible factors might become the primary method of treatment. People will be trained to use effective self-interventions as the first line of treatment. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In fact, I don't know of any prescription drug, surgical procedure or medical technology that can make that claim. This is an astonishing number, and I believe it goes to show the power of health freedom.
When we have free access to information that improves our lives, we, as free-thinking individuals, can use that information to make better decisions about what we eat, how much we exercise, what we avoid and essentially how we choose to live our lives. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 Despite miraculous advances in medical technology, genetic typing, and immunology, the nations of the world are not much better prepared for a severe flu epidemic than they were for the 1918 outbreak. Epidemic influenza is extremely difficult to counteract. Flu vaccines developed in any given year are notoriously ineffective against new strains that come along the following year. It takes seven months or more to create, test, manufacture, and distribute a vaccine developed in direct response to a new virus, and by that time the disease can burn through global populations. |
Alex Steffen
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 With all our public-health expertise, medical technology, and wealth, it is patently unnecessary.
We need to bolster our global public-health system, and extend the benefits to everyone. But we can also learn a lot from the efforts of those who have had to fight epidemics and medical injustice with nothing but good ideas and collaboration within communities. If we can combine the powerful tools of the former with the compassion and innovation of the latter, we can build a healthy future for all. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 According to Berman the clinic boasted the "latest and greatest" in medical technology, with all kinds of fancy machinery that will measure everything from genital blood flow to testosterone levels. What is still unclear is whether the clinic has adequately determined what is normal in terms of blood flow, lubrication, or testosterone levels. And more importantly, how often will women be inappropriatey diagnosed as being abnormal in order to try to sell them a medical or pharmaceutical solution? |
James Howard Kunstler
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| Disease would provide a convenient moral cover for an act of political desperation. The medical technology is certainly available. If this sounds too fantastic, imagine how outlandish the liquidation of European Jewry might have seemed to civilized Berliners in 1933. Yet it happened. The machinery of the Holocaust employed all the latest state-of-the-art industrial technology, and it was carried out by the statistical!} best-educated nation in Europe. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Maybe he owns stock in a new medical technology, or maybe he's a partner in a local medical clinic. His investments are doing great, but he's dying, and he's dying from preventable degenerative disease.
This is what's happening across the country, not just to one person, but to millions of people -- perhaps hundreds of millions -- who think the economy is looking up and think that maybe they have a good job because they work for a pharmaceutical company. They think they have good investments now because they have stocks in the junk food manufacturers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 All that medical technology, you see, is worthless if you don't have ethics guiding you in its use.
Now this isn't to say, by the way, that all doctors are unethical. Most doctors that I have met personally, even if they are followers of conventional medicine, are themselves ethical people. But they've arrived at that through personal experience, not through any formal education. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This includes areas like renewable energy, medical technology, life sciences and even vibrational medicine.
To expand our reach so that we may help millions more prevent birth defects, get their children off harmful psychiatric drugs, avoid deadly diseases like cancer and heart disease, and so on. (See articles on disease prevention.)
To expose and help end the corruption and criminal behavior in conventional medicine, where drug companies and the FDA routinely trade public safety for corporate profits. (See articles on conventional medicine. |
John E. Sarno, M.D.
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 There is not a blood test, x-ray, MRI, or other form of medical technology that establishes the diagnosis of a psychosomatic disorder. In addition, a psychosomatic diagnosis is not a diagnosis made because nothing else fits; it has its own set of signs and symptoms, some of which do overlap with structural disorders. The best tool a physician can use is a thorough history and physical examination. Once this is accomplished a differential diagnosis is established, which is a list of possible disorders that fit with the presenting signs and symptoms. |
| For modern readers who might be tempted to adopt a condescending attitude toward such late-nineteenth-century medical technology, it should be noted that present day medicine has its own electrical treatments, including transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation (TENS). And copper bracelets and magnets are the rage with many back pain sufferers. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Freud noted that patients treated with such methods might appear to be "cured," but then soon after, they would simply develop new symptoms. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Sometimes, of course, diseases are real, painful, and deadly, and treatment with the latest and most expensive drug or other medical technology or procedure is highly desirable. Yet there are many cases where a person's health problems are so mild or temporary that doing nothing is the best option. Irritable bowel syndrome, for example, will only be severe and disabling for a tiny fraction of the 20 percent of the entire population said to be afflicted by it. |
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