Most breast lumps found in women need to be looked at under the microscope to make sure they’re not cancer. But new research says too many women are getting unnecessarily aggressive open biopsies, which produce a scar, when most of them could get enough tissue for sampling with a simple needle stick. About 1.6 million….
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Hype Busters: Helping You Get Better Health Care
An overdose of news media hype has long been a problem for consumers who want high quality health care but don’t want to bounce from health fad to health fad. Naive and uncritical journalists who write about health care issues are a huge source of the hype overdose. So it’s great to learn about a….
Continue ReadingMaryland Hospital Pays Feds in Cardiac Malpractice Scandal
St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland will pay $22 million to the federal government to settle claims that it engaged in a decade-long, illegal kickback scheme with the cardiology group MidAtlantic Cardiovascular Associates, which was co-founded by Mark G. Midei – the cardiologist accused of performing hundreds of unnecessary heart procedures. More than 100….
Continue Reading“The Mammography Wars” and Doctors’ Conflicts of Interest
It was nearly a year ago that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force caused a huge uproar with the mildest imaginable recommendation about mammograms, and now two physician researchers say it might be time to point out that certain emperors are wearing no clothes. In their Sounding Board article in the New England Journal of….
Continue ReadingMalpractice Suit Exposes “Ghost Surgery” at the Cleveland Clinic
Sometimes patients sign up for surgery with an experienced surgeon who then allows a doctor in training, with far less experience, to do the actual surgery. If this hasn’t been disclosed up front by the surgeon and agreed to by the patient, the switcheroo is called “ghost surgery,” and it’s not acceptable. But exactly that….
Continue ReadingWhy Is U.S. Health Care So Expensive?
A new report comparing the United States to other industrialized countries has a depressing list of all the ways that America outstrips other countries in money spent but lags behind in health quality results. For example: * Per person, the U.S. spends twice as much on health care as on food, and much more than….
Continue ReadingConflicts of Interest: Not Bad People, Just Human
Recent news on this blog about unnecessary heart stents in Baltimore and overly complex back surgeries across America may give some readers the wrong idea. This malpractice and patient safety blog is not about good versus evil and picking a doctor to trust because you decide he or she is a “good” trustworthy person. Instead,….
Continue ReadingSurgery for Back Pain: Less Is More
Nearly every week, I hear about a patient who had surgery to relieve terrible chronic back pain and ended up far worse off than before. One of the biggest problems is that money motivates surgeons to talk patients into much bigger and more complex operations than they really need — and then those surgeries result….
Continue ReadingUpdate on Baltimore Cardiac Malpractice: Victims of One Doctor Could Exceed One Thousand
The scandal of Dr. Mark Midei, the cardiologist at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in the Baltimore suburb of Towson, Maryland, is scaling new heights in the number of victims counted. The hospital mailed letters to 585 Midei patients informing them that an independent review shows they may have received heart stents unnecessarily for artery narrowing….
Continue ReadingBaltimore Medical Malpractice Scandal Shows Systemic Problems of Hospital Peer Review
Hundreds of patients appear to have received cardiac stents that they didn’t need from Dr. Mark Midei, a cardiologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Towson, Maryland. So why did no one at the hospital blow the whistle? And why did the patients not realize that Midei was rushing them into unwise and risky surgery? Heart….
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