Conventional Medicine FAILS

[herb ox]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...united-states/



Funny, I didn't see acupuncture or Chinese medicine on this list

[herb ox]

Starting this new thread to balance out the "Complementary Medicine Fails".

[mawali]

Convention (allopathic) medicine is not a failure, per se, as its public health methodology does make a difference in the "developed" world and "not so developed" world but it is USA where the profit incentive distorts and amortizes/financialises health for greed and market share. In most indices, USA is not in the top 10! In USA, (Flint, MI) clean water is not a right so that tell you where the rest of stuff is

Dig dis! US pioneered vaccination as a way to forestall disease but now more "3rd world countries" are using that to make a difference while USA (many vocal citizens!)thinks it is a negative to vaccinate! Just sayin'

[SoCo KungFu]

Funny, I didn't see acupuncture or Chinese medicine on this list

For that to happen it would, you know, actually need to have an affect to begin with.

At any rate,

Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome

So if we're going to go ahead and define medical error as nearly any **** thing under the sun, we can also go ahead and lump all those instances of individuals dying do to cancer complications upon the shoulders of TCM. Because you know, its not just a coincidence that Taiwan has the highest rate of upper urinary tract cancer in the world.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK304331/

Rather than typing out another response to your ridiculousness, I'll just use the one this individual nicely put together,

Contribution is not Causation

Shame on the authors and publishers of this piece. This is a sensationalized title that harmfully misrepresents data, and seems to propel a dangerous paradigm against the medical establishment.

Disclosure: I am part of the medical establishment. I am a surgeon, and I acknowledge that this establishment has inherent error, and that error has and will lead to adverse events, including death. This does, and historically has, merited investigation. My protest is the dramatic overrepresentation of this phenomenon to dangerous proportions.

The claims of this paper are based on studies that have essentially found databases with patients that:

a. were in a hospital
b. had an adverse event during their stay
c. died
d. had someone indicate that the event was preventable
e. had someone indicate that the event contributed to the death

There are several deficiencies in extrapolating this to the "third leading cause of death".

1. Contribution is not Causation. A piano that falls on a pedestrian results in a death caused by a falling piano. Although any number of bystanders may have been able to alert the pedestrian or push him out of the way, the bystanders did not cause his death. The inaction of the bystanders may have contributed to his death, but far and away, their inaction was not the cause.

One common adverse event that leads to death is pneumonia. The overwhelming number of patients with pneumonia do not die, because humans have immune systems that prevent that. Many deaths from pneumonia occur because of an arsenal of comorbidities and failing organ systems that lead to the pneumonia becoming the needle breaking the camel’s back. The author’s cited sources would rule that all deaths from health-care-associated- or ventilator-associated pneumonia are "caused" by medical errors, but that is a reductionist and dangerously erroneous conclusion.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death. Most experts would agree that most patients that die of an atherosclerotic coronary event would not have died during that episode if they did not have the systemic, lifelong condition of cardiovascular disease. If you wish to list "medical error" on the list in third place after cardiovascular disease, can you make the same analysis? If you didn't put the patient on the ventilator, the one that is associated with his pneumonia, which someone thinks contributed to his death, would he have survived that episode? The patient was sick enough that he couldn't breathe for himself - do we really think that keeping him off the ventilator, or simply keeping his head elevated at 30 degrees or following the "ventilator bundle" would have kept all those patients from dying?

I contend that it is a profound public health disservice to compare such a cavalier characterization of "medical error" with entities as systemic & chronic as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

2. Reducible risk is not Preventable. Adverse events must be characterized as "preventable" to be included in the author's datasets. Deep vein thrombosis (DVT), and subsequently pulmonary embolism, is considered a "preventable" adverse event - and one that leads to death. It is certainly possible to reduce the risk of DVT with medicines and protocols. However, there are multiple, profoundly influential, biologic mechanisms that cause DVT, which are out of our control. Fundamentally, the body is designed to figure out when and how to make clots, and our lives depend on its ability to do so. For the foreseeable future, modern medicine will not be able to precisely determine when and where to make and prevent clots in the body. To believe that health care providers can prevent all DVTs from forming is to profoundly misunderstand pathophysiology. To further believe that all deaths due to DVTs are therefore preventable, is to misunderstand both pathophysiology and logic.

3. We accept that intervention has risk. All intervention has risk, and we as a society, as patients, and as providers, accept that. The case example, a pericardiocentesis, cannot be performed without risk. For the foreseeable future, there will never exist a way to transport fluid from the pericardial sac (point A) to the outside world (point B) without disturbing the matter between points A & B. It is tragic that this case resulted in the disruption of her liver and her subsequent death. However, it is naive to believe that there exists a human being who can put a needle into someone's heart consistently without ever having an adverse event - this is an inherent risk of the procedure. Society accepts that they have informed consent on these risks after consultation with their providers, and that they have the autonomy to take on these risks with the potential of the attendant benefits.

4. Fearmongering creates risk. The authors and publishers of this piece may simply wish to cast a light in a field of sizable consequence that lacks concrete data. That aim is admirable. What I protest, however, is the hyperbole that they have resorted to in order to achieve that aim. That hyperbole carries its own risk.

The case example cites "unnecessary" tests as an root cause of the patient's death. We know that a significant contributor to unnecessary testing is "defensive medicine". Defensive medicine draws its origins from malpractice claims, both reasonable and baseless, which has led to actual changes in practice. One notable change is the increase in unnecessary tests that providers order to protect themselves from potential litigation.

It is not a stretch to see the author's proposed paradigm pushing physicians into inaction - for fear of retribution upon medical errors caused by preventable adverse events. For the case example, a pericardiocentesis - if this is to be the cornerstone case of the movement, would we not expect this procedure to be performed less often? There is a tangible risk to this modification - the procedure does enable detection of life-threatening conditions, among other things.

This piece is a sensationalized sound bite based on misrepresented data that is both inaccurate in its implications and harmful to public welfare.

[SoCo KungFu]

In USA, (Flint, MI) clean water is not a right so that tell you where the rest of stuff is

The irony about this here, according to the way they've defined medical error, those individuals that died due to legionnaires disease early on in the Flint crisis could be counted in this analysis if the doctor inappropriately diagnosed pneumonia prior to anyone realizing the water supply was toxic.

Of course, more tests can prevent erroneous diagnoses. But then herbox would be in here complaining how western medicine just wants to scam people through unnecessary diagnostics. That's the problem with the alt med industry. They love to sit in the bleachers trying to chunk popcorn at the real players, but heaven forbid they have to start living up to standards like mainstream medicine. And when their crap is shown either useless (acupuncture) or incredibly dangerous (Ephedra), these children b!tch and moan about the evil big pharm just trying to hold them down.

[GeneChing]

Any failure of conventional medicine does nothing to support the success of TCM.

Nevertheless, it's a good place to post this news item.

PATIENTS TURN TO DODGY PRIVATE HOSPITALS FOR LACK OF OPTIONS.
SOURCE: STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Why Quacks Are Thriving in China

MAY 5, 2016 11:07 PM EDT
By Adam Minter

There are more than 10,000 private hospitals in China, and their numbers -- and revenues -- are growing every year. Yet they’re also among the least trusted institutions in China, widely assumed to be dens of quackery, malpractice and shameless profiteering.

So why do patients flock to them? One reason is that China’s top search engine, Baidu, accepts their advertising.

China’s Pain Points

That’s how Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old cancer patient, ended up spending more than $30,000 on what was advertised as an experimental treatment at a private Beijing clinic. He died on April 12, but not before writing an angry account of his fleecing that went viral on China’s Internet. For now, most criticism has focused on Baidu. But that’s not entirely fair. The Chinese government, which has been the first to point fingers in this case, is just as much at fault, in large part for its longstanding failures to reform and regulate China’s healthcare sector.

The problems start in Putian, a small city in China’s coastal Fujian Province. It’s best known as a manufacturing base for counterfeit designer footwear. But Putian’s biggest business is the network of 8,600 private hospitals owned and run by a handful of Putian families. Collectively, they represent roughly three-quarters of all private hospitals in China.

The empire has sordid roots in 1980s China, when a handful of entrepreneurs started selling iffy skincare treatments and later expanded into STD clinics. Their methods were less than ethical. A 2006 account by a Chinese state media organ claimed that the company often tricked people into paying for treatments when they had no STDs; in pursuit of additional business, some agents even allegedly sprayed public toilets in Shanghai with an itch-inducing lacquer.

The Putian clan’s methods don’t seem to have improved much since then. According to Caixin, a respected Chinese business magazine, some Putian-affliated hospitals threaten to punish doctors who don’t collect at least 1,000 yuan per patient -- the equivalent of $153 and an extraordinary sum when public hospital consultations can be had for the equivalent of $2 or $3 (plus a long wait). To meet the quota, doctors prescribe unnecessary treatments and drugs, oftentimes pressuring patients when at their most vulnerable. Vice recently reported on one man talked into undergoing a medically unnecessary circumcision at a Putian-affliated hospital, then “pushed” to sign off on more expensive procedures that eventually left him impotent.

These kinds of stories are rife in China, told and retold whenever Chinese complain about health care. Part of the problem is that there aren’t enough regulators to keep up with the growth in private hospitals and clinics. (Of course, even if there were enough, many Putian-owned facilities -- including the one used by Wei Zexi -- are embedded in military hospitals that are exempt from oversight by civil medical authorities.)

The bigger problem, though, is a lack of capacity in the state-run health system. Since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has steadily reduced its contributions to public health institutions in hopes that they’ll develop their own, market-based revenue sources. But many of these clinics and hospitals -- especially at the local community level -- simply aren’t able to survive without government help.

The same goes for medical personnel. China’s famous “barefoot doctors,” for example, who were trained over three-to-six month periods to offer simple medical care in rural villages, have largely disappeared. Well-trained general practitioners are almost as scarce -- China currently has 25,000 GPs serving a population exceeding 1.3 billion. Low pay deters many students from entering the field. So, too, does an ongoing epidemic of patient violence against physicians, driven by the widespread perception that the profession is profiteering and corrupt.

With no GP or community clinic to consult, most Chinese patients self-diagnose and then head to China’s overcrowded public hospitals to wait in line for a specialist. Those who don’t trust the public hospitals (and they have their own serious problems), either go directly to private hospitals or -- even worse -- scour the Internet for options. Baidu, China’s leading search engine, has long allowed medical providers to push up their listings in search rankings, making them look more legitimate.

The problem eludes easy fixes. Banning online advertising of medical services would be a good place to start, with one smaller Chinese search engine already announcing it will do so voluntarily. The Chinese government also needs to pay for more regulators, while extending their remit to cover military hospitals.

Above all, though, the government needs to improve the quantity and quality of China’s doctors. That means funding new clinics and subsidizing higher salaries for general practitioners and specialists in less-lucrative fields such as pediatrics. Strengthening malpractice laws would also encourage both private and public hospitals to focus more on patients than profits.

Training thousands of new doctors will take years. But if China is truly focused on creating a consumer-based economy, then ensuring the health of those consumers would seem a good place to start.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Adam Minter at aminter@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net