Maggie's Farm

Regarding the 'no studies show the effectiveness of..."

We are being gaslighted about the efficacy of various forms of medical treatment, in the interest of reducing the sorts of care that are legally required to be delivered under our incipient nationalized single payer health care plan.

You may remember controversies a while back regarding the effectiveness of annual mammograms and prostate cancer blood tests. Why, they're useless! They only detect a fairly small number of cancers!

The implication is we should stop paying for them with 'insurance,' or as increasingly is the case, with taxpayer money. Stop needless testing! Stop paying for unproven treatments! These sound like great ideas. The problem is a lot of medical things that are done are based on hunches, on low probabilities, or on things that are so well known as to not need extensive medical testing to deploy effectively.

With the cancer screenings - sure, there's a low probability of any given person having breast or prostate cancer at right this moment. But a lot of women do get breast cancer, and as many as a third of men get prostate cancer in one form or another if they live long enough. (Apparently, the 'off' switch is tucked up our rear ends, gents... odd, that...) If you are the person who has cancer - and there are many hundreds of thousands of such people - then paying for the screening even though it won't be needed (like flood insurance) seems prudent.

Other more extreme examples are out there. Ads touting the efficacy of aspirin for headaches are on the outs because there's just no recent peer reviewed studies showing aspirin cures headaches. Sure, we know they do, it's been known ever since native Americans in pre-Columbian America chewed willow bark for its curative properties - but there's no recent academic medical history of it so it must be fraudulent.

The idea that flossing and brushing don't really matter much is a product of this "if it hasn't been proved recently it ain't true" cost-cutting, medical regulatory mindset. I've had cavities detected and fixed before the teeth crumbled on my semi-annual visit, versus my big annual visit (at which X-rays are taken and more problems identified). My dentist can tell if I've been flossing or not because there's less rotting ex-food stuck under my gums when I've been flossing, and as she points out, that rotting food right there causes tooth rot - though again, it's only what she's witnessed for the last 20 years, it's not recently proven in a peer reviewed academic study.

Be very careful about taking advice from these news articles about how medical practices are ineffective. A lot of this new 'science' is driven by a weird sort of excessively rational logic, which is in turn motivated by the government's effort to reduce the amount of treatment it needs to pay for as the insurance system gets nationalized. Suffice to say, Rahm Emmanual's brother Zeke, who heads one of the cost cutting 'scientific' panels, does not have your interests at heart. He really only cares about cutting costs so that ordinary medical care, in the quantity and quality we've become accustomed to, does not undercut the left's health care nationalization politics. It is a good thing to look for efficiencies in the delivery of health care and to maximize how far the tax dollars spent on health care go, but this is a cynical and callous approach to cost-cutting, and a disingenuous one at that. You can expect the recommendations from all these new non-findings to continue to revolve around offering less health care, fewer pharmaceuticals, and to let more people die since attempting to cure them is not always a high percentage shot. Because, science.

And they made fun of Sarah Palin for talking about death panels.