181–190 of 256 posts
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that would be anarchy Yet it's exactly what we can do in the UK, I remember needing to see a doctor whilst on Holiday in Scotland, I just phoned the local GP and got an appointment the next day.
That must have been a while ago or in a quiet area; if I want to see my GP I have to either redial and hope from 8am or wait at least a week.
I'm glad to live in belgium, where i won't go broke if something happens.
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The nutshell is don't ever have foot surgery unless it's to repair a catastrophic injury/trauma and there is no choice if you want to save the foot. The risk/failure rates are so high and not honestly explained. I was left with ruined joints, damaged tendons, nerve damage, and RSD that spread up my legs and affects my whole body to a degree. I was misinformed and flat out lied to and have never met someone to this da…
For what it's worth, I have 2 friends who had knee replacement surgery a couple of years ago to address chronic knee pain, and despite being wealthy and committed enough that they were able to participate in all the recommend physical therapy for recovery, they are both still in more pain than they were before, and 1 of them has actually been getting worse in recent months, and was just told by doctors that based on…
Basically, an elaborate ritual.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/surgery-is-one-hell-of-...
>A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.1 Consider the middle-aged guy going in for surgery to treat his knee pain. Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 692,000 of them performed in 2010,2 but the procedure has proven no better than a sham when done to address degenerative wear and tear, particularly on the meniscus.3
>Meniscus repair is only one commonly performed orthopedic surgery that has failed to produce better results than a sham surgery. A back operation called vertebroplasty (done to treat compression fractures in the spine) and something called intradiscal electrothermal therapy, a “minimally invasive” treatment for herniated disks and low back pain, have also produced study results that suggest they may be no more effective than a sham at reducing pain in the long term.
There's even the question of is the pain even caused by the thing we are trying to fix?
>And then there’s what Thorlund calls “car repair” logic — something looks broken, so you try to fix it. A patient comes in with knee pain, and an X-ray or MRI exam shows a tear in the meniscus. The tendency is to assume that the torn meniscus is the cause of the pain and so should be fixed. However, studies show that MRIs can find all kinds of “abnormalities,” such as cartilage damage, even among people without knee pain. One such study looked at the MRI scans of more than 300 knees and found no direct link between meniscus damage and pain. “You can have a meniscal tear without having any problems,” Thorlund said.
>Back pain follows a similar pattern. Studies that examined MRIs of people’s backs show that things like slipped, bulging or herniated disks correlate very poorly with pain. Herniated disks and other supposed abnormalities are also common in people without back pain, and it’s telling that studies find that spinal fusion, another popular back surgery used to address disk problems, does not produce better results than nonsurgical interventions.
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Scans directly cause overdiagnosis. It's very non-intuitive but scans and tests have the potential to cause more harm than good. From TFA: >Overtesting has also created a new, unanticipated problem: overdiagnosis. This isn’t misdiagnosis—the erroneous diagnosis of a disease. This is the correct diagnosis of a disease that is never going to bother you in your lifetime. We’ve long assumed that if we screen a healthy po…
Solution -> never show a scan to a doctor who will over-react to an incidentaloma
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For what it's worth, I have 2 friends who had knee replacement surgery a couple of years ago to address chronic knee pain, and despite being wealthy and committed enough that they were able to participate in all the recommend physical therapy for recovery, they are both still in more pain than they were before, and 1 of them has actually been getting worse in recent months, and was just told by doctors that based on…
We know at least some widely used surgeries are probably no better than a placebo. "Placebo" in surgery is when they get a surgical crew together, anesthetize the patient, make an the appropriate incision, and then dick around for the time it would take to perform a surgery, maybe passing some tools back in forth. Basically, an elaborate ritual. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/surgery-is-one-hell-of-... >A 2014…
I was preparing to make a long post asking for ideas/help (been saying that for weeks but it's ready and I was waiting to Monday since weekends are slower) This sort of thing ruined my life, cost me everything, and has finally brought me to the precipice. I was convinced 15 years ago to have surgery to "prevent later disability" and it ironically left me disabled and in severe pain. I later found out abroad from seve…
There issue is two folds here. 1. Medical liability. Doctors must cover their basics or will get sue. 2. There is no cost relationship between doctors and patients. Doctors and patients work with 3rd party call health insurers. Worst, a lot of people (medicaid recipients) have no skin in the game. Obama could have fixed item #2 with a universal health care that require (1) doctors to list the price of their services…
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I dont have references right now but I have continually heard that long term studies have proven that knee (which I have also had that made things worse) and back surgeries (those two common ones have been extensively studied) show no overall improvement in pain years on compared to those who skipped surgery. In fact it is often worse and precipitates new issues. Surgery is a huge cash cow in the US. The ones that ar…
It's almost like there's a closely related cash cow incentivized to keep people in worsening chronic pain such that they need pain killers or something.
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MRIs should be safe. It's the unnecessary CT scans you want to avoid. Those blast you with x-rays and increase your risk of cancer by a non-negligible amount.
MRIs on healthy, asymptomatic individuals are not "safe," they cause harm due to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. I know TFA was a long read but it explains it, CTRL-F "turtle" to get to the part about tumors specifically. Here's a similar explanation: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screeni...
There issue is two folds here. 1. Medical liability. Doctors must cover their basics or will get sue. 2. There is no cost relationship between doctors and patients. Doctors and patients work with 3rd party call health insurers. Worst, a lot of people (medicaid recipients) have no skin in the game. Obama could have fixed item #2 with a universal health care that require (1) doctors to list the price of their services…
>Paying 20$ per visit... Such experiments have been made with Medicaid demo projects in the US. They've failed every time. People can't distinguish needed care from unneeded care; they end up foregoing needed care, deteriorate, and end up costing the system much more in the form of hospitalizations, disability, etc.