Why is it so hard to make a dent in the huge volume of unnecessary health care? In the U.S., about 20 to 30 percent of the medical interventions American patients receive are useless and often harmful, and waste hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
Insurers have known this for decades. These days, many more doctors have begun to see the big picture, along with policy makers. But the …
Fixing overtreatment: Lone rangers need not apply
Austin Frakt, health economics blogger at The Incidental Economist, has a post up commenting on Kenny Lin’s post about shared decision-making and PSA testing. The following is an edited comment I posted on that article.
I have to disagree with Kenny on this one, despite having written an article in the New York Times Magazine that strongly supported Kenny’s work at the US Preventive Services Task Force, which found …
Don’t discard shared decision making on the basis of PSA testing
For those who have been following the back and forth over the Less is More blog I posted last week, here’s the poster that upset some cardiologists when it was up on the Parsemus Foundation’s site.
Over the top? Of course it is — it’s satire! And like all good satire, it contains a few grains of truth mixed with a hefty dose of exaggeration.
Still, it’s only fair to point …
Decision aids need to be used for angioplasty and stents
Implantable defibrillators are truly life saving devices that have prevented sudden death in thousands of patients. No bigger than an iPod nano, the device can sense when the heart is beating irregularly and deliver an electrical jolt that kicks it back into proper rhythm. But like so many of medicine’s miracles, defibrillators are not always used on the right patients. According to a study published recently in the …
Shared decision making to determine implantable defibrillator need
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