Sadly, it is a dollar driven world. Medical and big pharma industries are extremely dollar driven. Harsh laws are needed (imo) to ensure that patients cannot be led into unnecessary or unwarranted procedures due to profit motives of others.
"The incentives are such that if there is no difference in risk to patients and people are faced with alternatives that profit them a little or a lot, a certain number of people will choose a lot," said Dr. Eugene J. Carragee, professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, who wrote an accompanying editorial. "It appears that the bigger operations are being done more than the pathology necessarily warrants."
The severity of spinal stenosis has not increased over the past few years, Carragee said. "Without much change in the disease itself, the kind of operations that are being done are increasingly dangerous," he said.
The findings should remind patients and surgeons to carefully assess the risks and benefits of various back procedures, he wrote.
A provision in the recently approved U.S. health care bill provides for studies of alternative procedures for safety and effectiveness, which could change current practice, Carragee said. But it will take years for such studies to be conducted on surgery for back pain, he noted.
SOURCES: Richard A. Deyo, M.D., M.P.H., the Kaiser Permanente-Endowed Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, Department of Family Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University , Portland, Ore.; Eugene J. Carragee, M.D., professor, orthopedic surgery, and chief, spine surgery center, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.; April 7, 2010, Journal of the American Medical Association"
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