December 7th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
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This past summer, DrRich wrote a post on the utter arrogance of the public health experts who are urging the FDA – and international bodies of busybodies – to mandate a policy of strict sodium restriction across the globe.
DrRich attempted to show how such a broad-based salt restriction at this juncture is ill-advised for three reasons. First, the conclusion that a population-wide salt restriction would actually do any good is not based on any actual prospective studies, but on a contrived extrapolation of observational data. Second, there is some evidence that a salt restriction would be harmful to at least a substantial minority of people, even if the overall effect on the population turns out to be positive. And third, there is good reason to believe that the degree of sodium restriction which is being recommended by the public health experts is below the level which is dictated by human physiology.
Perhaps salt restriction for the entire population will turn out to be a good idea. But perhaps not. So in his previous post, DrRich was advocating a prospective, randomized controlled trial to test this proposition before just going ahead and inflicting it upon hundreds of millions of Americans.
And now, as it happens, in recent weeks new studies have been published which question the safety of salt restriction for the whole population. In fact, five studies have been published just this year suggesting that salt restriction might be unsafe.
The latest, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that when you compare cardiovascular events (such as heart attack and stroke) to sodium intake, the incidence of those events follows a “J” curve. That is, cardiovascular events are lowest at an “optimal” level of sodium intake. But if sodium intake goes above that optimal level – or if it goes below it – the incidence of cardiovascular events increases. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
September 6th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Opinion
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A recurring theme of the CRB is that the rising cost of healthcare is the main internal threat to the continued viability of the US. Indeed, the very title of this blog reflects the chief mechanism which is being employed, fruitlessly and disastrously, in the attempt to reduce those costs.
Recently, DrRich pointed out that there are four ways – and only four ways – to reduce the cost of healthcare. He did this as a service to his readers, so that when politicians describe in their weaselly language how they will get the cost of healthcare under control, you will be able to figure out which of the four methods they are actually talking about.
While DrRich’s synthesis has been generally well-received, a few readers did offer one particular objection. DrRich, they assert, left out a fifth way to reduce the cost of healthcare, and the very best way at that. Namely, just get rid of the waste and inefficiency.
DrRich has talked about this before, but obviously it is time to revisit the issue.
It is, in fact, a central assumption of any healthcare reform plan ever proposed that we can get our spending under control simply by eliminating – or at least substantially reducing – the vast amount of waste and inefficiency in the healthcare system. Conservatives propose to do this by Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
July 19th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Opinion
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In his last post, DrRich pointed out to his PCP friends that their chosen profession of primary care medicine is dead and buried – with an official obituary and everything – and that it is pointless for PCPs to waste their time worrying about “secret shoppers” and other petty annoyances.
It is time for you PCPs to abandon “primary care” altogether. It is time to move on.
Walking away from primary care should not be a loss, because actually, primary care has long since abandoned you. Whatever “primary care” may have once been, it has now been reduced to strict adherence to “guidelines,” 7.5 minutes per patient “encounter,” placing chits on various “Pay for Performance” checklists, striving to induce high-and-mighty healthcare bureaucrats (who wouldn’t know a sphygmomanometer from a sphincter) to smile benignly at your humble compliance with their dictates, and most recently, competing for business with nurses.
This is not really primary care medicine. It’s not medicine at all. It’s something else. But whatever it is, it’s what has now been designated by law as “primary care,” and anyone the government unleashes to do it (whether doctors, nurses, or high-school graduates with a checklist of questions) now are all officially Primary Care Practitioners.
What generalist physicians (heretofore known as primary care physicians) need to realize is that “primary care” has been dumbed-down to the point where abandoning it is no loss; indeed, it ought to be liberating to walk away from it.
The beauty is that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
July 4th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Opinion
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Everyone agrees that national spending on healthcare is on a trajectory to bankrupt America during the lifetimes of even Old Farts like DrRich. And therefore, most folks* agree that we ought to do something to reduce our national spending on healthcare.
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*The reason it’s only “most folks” who agree is that, apparently, some folks are still partial to the Cloward-Piven strategy, and continuing to spend on healthcare as we are doing today is the quickest and surest way to get there.
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Unfortunately, our national “discussion” on how to achieve this reduction in healthcare spending has devolved into a spectacle of accusations and counter-accusations, vituperation, abuse, and scurrility. Accordingly, not much useful has so far been achieved. Worse, the back-and-forth contumelies lobbed by the various interest groups in this national discussion have created a general sense among the public that the problem is so confused and chaotic, so rifled by conflicts of interest, and so very complex, as to be fundamentally unsolvable.
This general sense of despair is entirely unnecessary. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
June 24th, 2011 by DrRich in Health Policy, Opinion
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Podcast:
In an article appearing last week in the American Heart Journal, investigators concluded that if American doctors would prescribe for their patients with heart failure each of the six therapies which are most strongly recommended in current heart failure guidelines, 68,000 lives per year could be saved.
The following (for the interest of the reader, and for the convenience of any attorneys who may follow DrRich’s offerings), is an ordered list of these six proven, life-saving heart failure therapies, along with the number of American lives that could be saved each year if only American doctors would stop grossly under-utilizing them in violation of published guidelines:
- aldosterone antagonist therapy – 21,407 lives
- beta blockers – 12,922 lives
- implantable defibrillators (ICDs) – 12,179 lives
- cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) – 8317 lives
- hydralazine plus isosorbide – 6655 lives
- ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) – 6516 lives
The authors, of course, are careful to point out that their analysis is based on statistical methods, and thus must be counted as merely estimates of the magnitude of the benefit that would actually occur should American doctors suddenly begin managing their heart failure patients appropriately. (Their presentation of these estimates to five significant figures implies a level of precision far in excess of what can be justified, and therefore must be an oversight not only by the authors, but also by the reviewers and the editors. But still, one gets the idea. A lot of preventable deaths are being left on the table.)
Several studies have reported, over and over again, that fewer than half of American patients with heart failure Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
