Fear, Greed and X-Rays

On the fear side, consider this email I got from a physician friend who had read galleys of my book Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future which will be released September 8, 2009:

"You should spend some time with me in our ER, which is totally typical of what is going on all over the U.S. Incredibly expensive, unnecessary, and potentially harmful X-ray scans are ordered with gay abandon on all patients to make sure that 'nothing is missed' that a lawyer might later use against the ER. Patients with the most ridiculous complaints are admitted to the CCU [critical care unit] just to make sure that an MI [myocardial infarction, a.k.a. heart attack] is not missed. I would guess that $10,000 dollars per day or more of wasted X-ray radiation studies occur in our ER everyday. Multiply this times 365 and times the thousands of ERs in the country and you come up with billions and billions of dollars of pure waste in our system."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/fear-greed-and-x-rays_b_270828.html

“You should spend some time with me in our ER, which is totally typical of what is going on all over the U.S. Incredibly expensive, unnecessary, and potentially harmful X-ray scans are ordered with gay abandon on all patients to make sure that ‘nothing is missed’ that a lawyer might later use against the ER.”

Not all checks and balances are done “with Gay abandon”...many are done with an abundance of care...and MOST are done to protect them from Ambulance chasers like Johnny Edwards...what are they saying, why not just roll the dice on these people?

Is this a treatise on why we need Tort reform before we even TOUCH Health Care? I hope so, but I doubt it...;

Sorry, won’t go to HuffPo...

Our priest just had some cancer surgery, 6 pathologists supposedly read his tests and had to be paid. He told the Dr. that he only wanted one of them to read it after they had to do another surgery.

Hopefully, the one who read it is wrong because he said they didn’t get it all this time either.

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