Archive for September 26th, 2009

Barack Obama, M.D.

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Barack Obama has declared that it would greatly improve health care if women got more mammograms, and save us a lot of money in reduced health care costs.

While some feminists have been pushing this notion as an agenda item, the science says otherwise.   Routine mammograms INCREASE the risk of breast cancer because of the radiation used in the procedue – which more than offsets the value of detecting a few cancers a little bit earlier.

Study

There is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes things are true soley because he said them.

It will be interesting to see how Dr Dean Edell handles this situation – he’s long been an advocate of keeping politicians away from driving decision making in medicine.   Will Dr Edell take on President Obama’s uninformed statements and beliefs?

Posted in Politics, Technology Politics | 1 Comment »

Save health care costs by stopping obesity? Think again

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

This Dutch study is one more coming to the same conclusion:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029

Conclusions

Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

Or to put it more bluntly,  people who live an “unhealthy” life style die earlier and quickly – people with a “healthy” lifestyle live long enough to end up with Alzheimer’s and wind up in a nursing home for 20 years…

That’s not even considering the effect on the Social Security system.   The medical system (and government’s) goal measures success by quantity of life, not quality of life.   But no matter how hard medicine works, you will not live forever.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »