Repost: This is why I do what I do

Whether you are a parent or not, this type of thing should open your eyes a little to the choices we make, and the choices that are often 'forced' upon us. We need to think critically and challenge those who don't. Even if they are doctors. They are humans too.

Also, please click on the video and go to YouTube to read the comments to this video. Max isn't the only kid this has happened to.

Few Medical Studies Actually Compare One Treatment to Another

A study released in the March 10, 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) noted that most other studies in medical journals do not compare one type of treatment to another. According to the study, and several news articles written about this study, most medical studies are testing a new drug and not looking to see how it compares to drugs already on the market, or to non-drug care.
It is the lack of "comparative effectiveness" studies that makes it hard for patients and doctors to evaluate which course of treatment or care is best for a patient. A March 10, 2010, article on this study in the Los Angeles Times noted that this is the reason that there is such a large discrepancy between the way medical doctors care for patients with the same ailments.
Coauthors of the study and the LA Times article, Drs. Danny McCormick and Michael Hochman, explained how they conducted their study in the Times article by saying, "In the study, we analyzed 328 medication studies recently published in six top medical journals and found that just 32% were aimed at determining which available treatment is best. The rest were either aimed at bringing a new therapy to market or simply compared a medication with a placebo. Whether the therapy was better or worse than other treatments was simply not addressed."
In an attempt to explain why very few studies are done to check existing treatments against new drugs, the authors explained, "So why, then, did only a third of medication studies focus on helping doctors use existing therapies more effectively? The answer lies in the fact that pharmaceutical companies fund nearly half of all medication research, including the lion's share of large clinical trials. For obvious reasons, commercially funded research is primarily geared toward the development of new and marketable medications and technologies. Once these products have won approval for clinical use, companies no longer have incentives to study exactly how and when they should be used."
Not surprisingly, the research showed that most of the studies done are funded by drug companies trying to get approval for their new drugs. The study also showed that the few studies that actually do "comparative effectiveness" and look at one type of care as compared to another, were mostly funded by the government or received other non-drug company related funding.

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Do Your Best to Stay Out of Hospitals...

The above is a headline from the February 23rd, 2010 issue of the New York Daily News. The article reports on a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on February 22, 2010. The study and resultant articles point out that approximately 48,000 patients die each year from pneumonia or blood poisoning picked up in hospitals.
In this study, hospital discharge records were looked at on 69 million patients who were in hospitals in 40 US states between 1998 and 2006. The records were examined to look for blood infections or pneumonia. Problems of these types that were acquired from outside the hospital were excluded, so that the data only showed problems resulting from a stay at the hospital.
The results of this large study brought forth some alarming data. The study revealed that hospital-acquired illnesses were responsible for 2.3 million extra patient days in hospitals. These extra days in a hospital resulted in a cost of $8.1 billion in the year 2006 alone. Overall, 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections are diagnosed every year.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, spokesperson for Resources for the Future, the group that sponsored the study, reacted to the high rates of infection by saying, "In many cases, these conditions could have been avoided with better infection control in hospitals."
One of the researchers on the study, Anup Malani, from the University of Chicago, added, "That's the tragedy of such cases. In some cases, relatively healthy people check into the hospital for routine surgery. They develop sepsis because of a lapse in infection control and they can die."

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Low Back Pain Surgeries, Though More Dangerous & Expensive, Are Increasing

We have a problem in America when surgeries for uncomplicated low back pain are rising in frequency, when conservative treatments, such as Chiropractic, have been proven to be more cost-effective and safer.

CHICAGO – A study of Medicare patients shows that costlier, more complex spinal fusion surgeries are on the rise — and sometimes done unnecessarily — for a common lower back condition caused by aging and arthritis.
What's more alarming is that the findings suggest these more challenging operations are riskier, leading to more complications and even deaths. Read More...

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Study: Breast-feeding would save lives, money

Brief, but short and good article about the benefits of Breast-feeding.

The lives of nearly 900 babies would be saved each year, along with billions of dollars, if 90 percent of U.S. women fed their babies breast milk only for the first six months of life, a cost analysis says.
Those startling results, published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics, are only an estimate. But several experts who reviewed the analysis said the methods and conclusions seem sound.

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Movie Reviews: Shrink

I'll start by saying that I'm no movie critic. However, this movie was very good. It stars Kevin Spacey, Keke Palmer, and Robin Williams. It's a sad, kinda melancholy film about grief, specifically regarding Spacey, and his inability to deal with a personal tragedy while turning to smoking pot to cope with the pain and despair. The story travels between 4 or 5 characters, all of whom are intertwined in some way (sometimes that 'web' is cheesy and predictable in some movies, but it was used well here). The soundtrack was very good, a lot of instrumental music - created a very good tone for the movie. I'd caution you to watch this if you are experiencing any level of despair yourself, due to the obvious story, but the movie line allows the watcher to accept grief, and the realities of pain and loss, while making just enough room for the real possibility of hope and well... not the absence of grief, but the moving forward with grief. Two thumbs up.

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Longrunning Controversy on Autism and Vaccines - by Dr. Redwood

From his blog, the www.dailyhitblog.com,

"I do not hold a firm opinion on this topic. This controversy has swirled for an extended time and allegations of falsifying data by both sides have muddied the waters to the point where uncertainty seems a reasonable response.

If one is to believe the preponderance of evidence in the peer-reviewed literature, a causal link is hard to find.

But in this article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, a man whose intelligence and integrity I trust, a series of very serious questions are raised about the quality of that evidence and the honesty of the central figure behind the research used to attack claims of a vaccine-autism link.

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC’s claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. Thorsen’s 2003 Danish study reported a 20-fold increase in autism in Denmark after that country banned mercury based preservatives in its vaccines. His study concluded that mercury could therefore not be the culprit behind the autism epidemic.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry. This new law and the opening of a clinic dedicated to autism treatment in Copenhagen accounted for the sudden rise in reported cases rather than, as Thorsen seemed to suggest, the removal of mercury from vaccines. Despite this obvious chicanery, CDC has long touted the study as the principal proof that mercury-laced vaccines are safe for infants and young children. Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury — a potent neurotoxin — at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.

I encourage you to read the whole article. I hope it is not true that researchers (and possibly the CDC itself) have engaged in fraudulent activity. This article leads me to keep an open mind on the topic and await further developments."