One of the few things that could bring me back from these nether regions to the Covert Rationing Blog, if only for a moment, has happened. The esteemed Dr. Robert Centor, affectionately known as DB in the medical blogosphere, has made a comment on one of my posts, and it is a comment that deserves serious consideration. Further, I find I cannot give his comment appropriate justice by simply answering it with another comment. It requires more.

So, we interrupt this hiatus from blogging in order to give the kind of thoughtful response DB’s comment deserves.

I have been a reader of DB’s blog for several years – substantially longer than the nearly five years I have been writing the CRB. I consider DB to be the voice of internal medicine as it should be practiced. DB is a master of cutting through the fluff to get at the root of what is ailing the practice of medicine today. He has substantially influenced my thinking over the years, and many of DB’s writings have validated (in my mind, at least) certain of my syntheses of some key problems regarding the present state of medical practice. Indeed, out of sheer respect for DB I have dropped in this post the rather haughty 3rd person approach I traditionally use herein.

At one time I was a relatively frequent commenter on DB’s blog, and the exchanges that ensued between us have been some of the highlights of my blogging career (such as it is). But two years ago I stopped posting comments on DB’s Medical Rants, and I stopped making any reference here to DB or his blog. I did so for one simple reason.

It was two years ago that I had my public dust-up with the ACP over the issue of medical ethics. It was a dust-up that drew the notice and disapprobation of some individuals quite well placed within the ACP leadership. Knowing that DB is a member of the ACP’s Board of Regents, I feared that if I continued acting as if I were one of his “blogging buddies” it might reflect poorly on him. The ACP (an organization of which I was a proud member for over 25 years, quitting only when they published their New Medical Ethics in 2002) badly needs voices like DB’s. Indeed, the fact that they value his voice gives me hope. So, out of respect for him, and in consideration of what I guessed were his best interests, I stopped interacting with DB and his blog altogether, though I have remained a regular reader. I realize that, realistically, what I may do or not do almost certainly has no effect whatsoever on DB’s relationship with the ACP, but it was something I felt I needed to do.

In any case, that self-imposed avoidance has now been made moot by DB himself.

In his comment DB takes exception to one (or more likely, several) of my recent posts. I will reproduce his entire comment here:

“First, I admit to bias as a member of the ACP Board of Regents.

DrRich (whom I like and admire) has used a technique that we all use. He has established a straw man and beat that straw man into submission.

ACP advocates strongly for high-value, cost-conscious care (HVCCC). In fact a recent Annals article – Appropriate Use of Screening and Diagnostic Tests to Foster High-Value, Cost-Conscious Care – http://www.annals.org/content/156/2/147.abstract – very explicitly attacks low value high cost care.

Advocating for HVCCC does not mean advocating for rationing based on cost alone.

As DrRich always states, we have covert rationing and we believe that rationing has no relation to value.

ACP has challenged all physicians to avoid medications and tests that do not have high value. How is that “herd medicine”?

Please review the recommendations in the recent Annals article and tell us where we have developed recommendations for cost reasons only.

I admire your debating skills, but in my opinion you are not addressing the same question that we are addressing. I speak from clinical experience. I see too many tests ordered that cannot help the patient. I see too many treatments that cost too much without a clear advantage over less expensive treatments.

We should strive for high value care for all our patients. We should eschew low value expensive care for most patients (of course one can construct exceptions to this generalization). Let’s not let hyperbole confuse the issue. We cannot afford unnecessary expenses. We challenge you to define unnecessary. I think you can.”

I believe DB has misunderstood my main argument. This is not his fault. I have been accused more than once of being somewhat obtuse. So let me state it very explicitly:

1) It has been determined that individualized decision making by doctors and patients is the problem, and to resolve this problem clinical decisions need to be centralized.*
2) Obamacare renders much individualized decision making illegal, and establishes formal mechanisms for centralized decision making.
3) The ACP’s New Medical Ethics, whether by intention or not, has allowed agents of the Central Authority to argue that individualized decision making is unethical.
4) Centralized decision making will likely yield better results for the collective, better results for the “average” patients, but suboptimal results for people on the wrong side of the distribution curve – and terrible results for people on the tail of the curve. DB himself has written about this tail.

____

* From the book “New Rules,” by Berwick and Brennan:

“Today, this isolated relationship [between doctor and patient] is no longer tenable or possible. . . Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad, must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care. . . The primary function of regulation in health care. . .is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.”

____

There is nothing in my argument that says physicians should avoid attempting to practice high-value medicine. Obviously, they should. There is nothing in this argument that says it is wrong or counterproductive for the ACP (or other professional organizations) to devise publications, guidelines, opinions, or any other kind of aid to assist doctors in making appropriate clinical decisions that will minimize waste for society and harm to their patients. Doing these things is good for the healthcare system and for mankind.

What is wrong is a system that says that centrally-generated clinical “guidelines” must be followed to the letter by all doctors for all patients under all circumstances, and that failing to do so is both illegal and unethical.

The document to which DB refers me – an attempt by the ACP to assign values to certain clinical services – is a good one, and I am sure clinicians should find it helpful. I can’t help but believe that he sent me to this particular document because it explicitly calls out implantable defibrillators (the development of which played a significant role in my professional career) as a high-value medical service. That’s very nice.

But this fact leads me to use, as an example of what I’m talking about, the abuse of ICD guidelines by the Central Authority. A year ago an article appeared in JAMA complaining that 22% of ICD implants did not meet the guidelines. That number (which seems about right to me, if guidelines were being treated as just that) was widely castigated as evidence that doctors were engaging in widespread abuse of this expensive medical device. This was followed, 2 weeks later, by an announcement that the Department of Justice was conducting an investigation of guideline violations by ICD implanters. As a first step in this investigation, the DOJ elicited the cooperation of the Heart Rhythm Society – the professional organization of electrophysiologists – and the HRS let out that it was effectively gagged from further comment or action on behalf of its members for the duration of the investigation.

The specific part of the ICD guidelines that produced the majority of the “violations” was not that ICDs were being used in people who did not really need them. Rather, it was that ICDs were being implanted earlier than the Feds preferred for people who, everyone agreed, should have an ICD. That is, implanters were not waiting the full mandated 4 – 6 weeks after a heart attack, or after heart failure was diagnosed, before implanting ICDs in some of their patients. Two points about this: First, there are clearly individuals who should receive their ICDs within the first month of a heart attack or heart failure diagnosis, despite what the guidelines say. (For instance, if the patient also has an indication for a pacemaker – not an uncommon thing – following the guidelines would require first implanting a pacemaker, then, a few weeks later, doing a second invasive procedure to replace it with an ICD). Second, the clinical evidence supporting this 4 – 6 week waiting period is based on two fundamentally flawed studies, and constituted the weakest part of the clinical evidence regarding ICDs, and while it is now apparently considered settled science if not gospel, it was originally considered highly controversial when the guidelines first appeared.

We don’t know what the results of the DOJ’s investigation will be. Perhaps nothing will come of it and no electrophysiologists will go to jail this time.

Here’s what we do know:

- Doctors are expected to follow clinical guidelines to the letter, with every patient, whether it makes sense for an individual or not.
- Doctors who are not following centralized guidelines to the letter are behaving illegally, and the DOJ – that’s the DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE people, and not HHS or Medicare – will investigate, and at least threaten criminal prosecution.
- Doctors who are not following centralized guidelines to the letter are behaving unethically. (Go back and re-read the commentary from the press and from other physicians, especially physicians who strongly support Obamacare’s centralized decision making, about the ethics of these ICD-guideline-violators.)
- Such legal and ethical intimidation will prevent doctors from “violating” guidelines for their individual patients who are a standard deviation or two away from the mean, and who clearly need an exception.

That’s my argument. The activities of the ACP, vis a vis establishing helpful studies of the relative clinical value of various clinical actions, or even guidelines for clinical practice (if treated as actual guidelines), are to be lauded and not criticized, and I so laud them.

The ACP has not instituted herd medicine, nor advocated it explicitly, to my knowledge. My only criticism of the ACP has to do with their altering the precepts of medical ethics to make it ethically compatible for doctors to go along with herd medicine. The Central Authority on its own volition has taken it the rest of the way – to where it’s unethical NOT to go along with heard medicine. This “adjustment” of medical ethics is just what the Central Authority needed in order to validate its policy of centralized decision making, and the ACP provided it. The glee on the part of the government’s agents in response to the ACP’s New Ethics is palpable.

I still find this a sad, sad thing for the profession, and especially for patients. I also find it very sad for the ACP itself which, by producing the kind of helpful resources to which DB has referred us, would continue to be a great force for good – were it not for this one very basic, very fundamental, very critical, and therefore utterly tragic flaw.

Farmer Emanuel has 10,000 head of cattle in his beef herd. He prides himself in staying up to date on all the latest methods, so he knows that adding a certain antibiotic to their feed will reduce the incidence of intestinal infections, and will increase his annual overall yield, measured in pounds of beef, by 7%. Unfortunately, he also knows that roughly one in 200 of his cattle will experience a likely fatal allergic reaction to the antibiotic. It is possible to do a blood test to determine which specific members of the herd are allergic, but the test itself is quite expensive, and the logistics of separating the allergic cattle at feeding time and providing them with their own antibiotic-free feed would be expensive enough to entirely wipe out his savings.

Obviously, the cost-effective solution is for Farmer Emanuel to give antibiotic-treated feed to all his cattle, accepting the losses of a few head as the necessary price for an impressive overall gain in productivity. He would be an ineffective and incompetent rancher indeed if he were to pass up this opportunity to achieve cost-effectiveness.

For the last two posts (here and here) DrRich has had some fun in deconstructing the Sixth edition of the American College of Physicians’ Ethics Manual, and especially in demonstrating how the ACP leadership has managed to wrap its collective tongue around the axle defending its unfortunate choice of the word “parsimonious” to describe the ideal mind-set of the modern physician. In the present post, DrRich will discuss a somewhat more serious aspect of the document, namely, what this re-statement of medical ethics really means, and why it was produced.

The Sixth Edition of the ACP Ethics Manual elevates the term “cost-effectiveness” to an ethical mandate; and furthermore, it locks this often ambiguous term down into its apparently final form, and in so doing formally launches the era of herd medicine.

Until now, efforts at covert healthcare rationing have been aimed mainly at coercing individual physicians to surreptitiously withhold certain medical services at the bedside. Mainly, doctors were to accomplish this withholding of care simply by failing to inform patients of all their medical options, or perhaps more commonly, by painting certain medical options in an unfavorable light (so that, while they were, in fact, offered, they were offered in such a way that the patient would almost certainly turn them down).

What the Central Authority has learned, over the past 15 years, is that this style of covert rationing simply doesn’t work. It still leaves medical decisions up to individual doctors and individual patients, who have apparently continued to act against the best interests of the collective despite all the coercion that has been brought to bear. The end result has been unremittingly bad – healthcare costs have continued to rise at multiples of both the GDP and the general level of inflation. It has become obvious to the Central Authority that, in order to set the matter right, all healthcare decisions will have to be made centrally, from the top down.

Accordingly, during the first decade of the New Millennium we saw a steadily rising emphasis on “guidelines.” Guidelines are not intrinsically a bad thing, and indeed, when properly used can be greatly beneficial to both doctors and patients. But in a relatively gradual process, guidelines came to be spoken of as more than merely guidelines – that is, as more than helpful considerations which doctors ought to take into serious account when deciding what’s best for an individual patient. Instead, guidelines have become directives for definite action.

In 2010, the Obamacare legislation took the concept of “guidelines” a giant step forward, and essentially rendered it a crime for doctors to “violate” guidelines, which are now to be handed down by federally-appointed panels of experts. As if to emphasize this new paradigm, the Department of Justice a year ago began a secretive investigation of an unknown number of electrophysiologists, for alleged violations of guidelines for using implantable defibrillators. We do not know if any criminal charges will be brought (and because the particular aspect of those guidelines which doctors have allegedly violated were based on rather flimsy evidence, perhaps not), but during the past year American electrophysiologists have certainly been intimidated into reducing the number of implantable defibrillators they offer to their patients. (And so, whether any charges come out of this “investigation” or not, mission accomplished!)

Dear Reader, how do you suppose some of these electrophysiologists must feel, after failing to offer implantable defibrillators to their patients who they believe have clear-cut indications for the device, knowing that by failing to offer this treatment their patients may very well (and very predictably) suffer sudden death? At least a few doctors, DrRich warrants, are probably feeling very guilty about it.

And here is the real import of the updated Ethics Manual. It aims to assuage the guilty conscience of physicians who follow handed-down guidelines to the letter, even against their better medical judgment, instead of tailoring the application of those guidelines to the benefit of their individual patients (which, DrRich feels compelled to remind his readers, was the original but now archaic intention of “guidelines.”) Doctors who had been feeling badly because they were preserving their own skin at the cost of their patients’ can now take heart. They are not behaving selfishly at all, the New Ethics assures them. They are in fact acting for the greater good of the collective – and therefore they are obeying a higher principle of ethics than those outmoded principles mentioned in the Hippocratic Oath.

While herd medicine was made the law of the land by Obamacare, until now it was still technically unethical. The ACP’s new Ethics Manual repairs that uncomfortable discrepancy, using, of course, what has become the traditional methodology. (That is, when it becomes  difficult or impossible to adhere to ethical precepts, change them.)

For those who missed it, the relevant passage of the new Ethics Manual states that physicians have an ethical obligation to “practice effective and efficient health care and to use health care resources responsibly. Parsimonious care that utilizes the most efficient means to diagnose a condition and treat a patient respects the need to use resources wisely. . .”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel offers the midrash on this passage, in his editorial which accompanied the publication of the new Ethics Manual. Emanuel rhapsodizes that it is “truly remarkable” that an “authoritative medical body [is] using such words as ‘efficient’ and ‘parsimonious’ – and without ‘qualifications’ – to describe the ideal physician’s practices.” Dr. Emanuel notes further that to fulfill this new ethical obligation toward efficiency and parsimony, the Ethics Manual specifies that doctors should act based on “the best available evidence in the biomedical literature, including data on the cost-effectiveness of different clinical approaches.”

And that, readers, is the key, for it specifies how doctors, in pursuit of the new ethics, are to act. They are to follow the “best evidence,” in particular, the best evidence on “cost-effectiveness.”

In the past, when doctors were exhorted to practice cost-effectively, the term was used as a general admonition to not be wasteful. But here, in this formal ethics document (as in the Obamacare legislation), it has now become a term of art. “Cost-effective” now has a specific meaning. It is cost-effectiveness as determined by “best evidence,” and since any body of clinical evidence will inevitably have conflicts, and since doctors cannot be expected (or permitted) to determine for themselves which evidence is best in every clinical situation, Dr. Emanuel is talking about the “best evidence” which will be determined by one of his panels of experts.

Therefore, the ACP’s new Ethics Manual stipulates that it is now an ethical obligation for doctors to follow expert-produced guidelines to the letter.

But in the real world, there is no single “best” determination of cost-effectiveness. This is because any determination of cost-effectiveness depends entirely on who is making the assessment. For instance, when DrRich was deciding whether to buy a smoke alarm to protect himself and his family from dying in a fiery inferno, he judged it to be cost-effective to do so. For a mere $20, DrRich was able to protect himself and his family from death or injury, in the unlikely event that a fire should occur in his home. A bargain to be sure, and at least by DrRich’s lights it was highly cost-effective (if only for the peace of mind it brought him).

But if the purchase of fire alarms was covered under Obamacare (and why should it not be, since fire-related injury is certainly a medical problem, which produces a burden for our healthcare system), then the cost effectiveness calculation would look very different. For while fire alarms indeed save lives, they do so at an exorbitant cost – likely more than a million dollars per life-year saved. Clearly, from the perspective of the collective, the purchase of fire alarms ought to be made illegal, and owning one a crime.

And the only reason it’s not a crime is that such Fire Protection Appliances have not (yet) been designated as being subject to the rulings of the US Preventive Services Task Force.

It is axiomatic, therefore, that the assessment of the cost-effectiveness of any product or service will depend on which party of interest is doing the assessment. And often, what might very well be considered cost-effective by an individual might just as well be considered criminally cost-ineffective by the collective.

And so we have the situation, under both Obamacare and now under the new code of medical ethics, in which doctors are obligated to practice medicine cost-effectively, and the kind of cost-effectiveness being referred to is decidedly NOT the kind that applies to individuals. It’s the kind that applies to the collective.

Those assembling the GOD panels (Government Operatives Deliberating) – the panels which will determine the most cost-effective way to practice medicine, and which will distribute rules down to American physicians for deciding who gets what, when and how – tell us that what’s good for the herd is certainly what’s good for the individual. Indeed, this is the precise message of Dr. Hood, president of the ACP.

For the majority of Farmer Emanuel’s beef cattle, this may very well be the case. But for the unfortunate beeves who will turn out to have a fatal allergy to the antibiotic, and who could have been saved with a little extra effort aimed at optimizing the results for every individual, well, not so much. (Progressives like Keynes have been known to justify such results by noting that whatever we do has limited significance for individuals, since, in the end we individuals – like the beef cattle – are all dead anyway.)

Until last week American physicians were ethically obligated to optimize their medical care for every individual, as difficult and dangerous as it has become for doctors to do so in recent years.  No doubt some of them will be relieved to know that their ethical obligations now have been formally changed, to comport with the requirements of their masters, and the facts on the ground.

So open wide and say Moo.

The American College of Physicians published the Sixth Edition of its Physicians Ethics Manual yesterday. Regular readers may find it surprising to hear DrRich say that there is little objectionable in it, and actually much to admire – that is, when it is considered as it is written, as a stand-alone document.

But of course, when it comes to statements of medical ethics in the New Millennium, one cannot rely on the face value of the written word. For the purpose of the modern medical ethicist is to supply a plausible justification for the covert rationing of healthcare. That is, they need to make it ethically justifiable (if not ethically mandatory) for doctors to ration their patients’ healthcare at the bedside. Because statements of medical ethics cannot just come out and say that, ethicists must compose these statements quite artfully, so that when somebody (like DrRich) calls them on it, they can indignantly deny any such thing.

Therefore, DrRich submits, an accurate interpretation of the ACP’s New Ethics Manual requires an exegesis – that is, it requires that we go beneath the actual words, that we explore the derivation of this text, in order to discover its true underlying meaning. Fortunately, this process will be pretty straightforward, and will not require us to have a working knowledge of Latin, Greek or Hebrew. Plain English will do, as long as we keep the true aim of the modern medical ethicist in mind.

Accordingly, we need to begin this exercise by reminding ourselves of what that true aim is. This was probably stated most clearly in a quote DrRich has used before, by Dr. Berwick and his co-author Dr. Troyen Brennan (another ACP ethics maven) in their 1995 book, “New Rules.” To wit: “Today, this isolated relationship [between doctor and patient] is no longer tenable or possible. . . Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad, must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care. . . The primary function of regulation in health care. . .is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.”

That is, the primary aim of the new medical ethics is to get doctors to stop focusing on the specific, unique needs of their individual patients, and instead to focus on what is best for society – which means acceding to centralized, collectivized decision making (the opposite of the decentralized, individualized decision making which the ethicists are pledged to constrain). For doctors to do so, of course, will utterly violate the primary ethical precept which the profession has followed for more than two millennia, and so, obviously, if only for the sake of appearance, will require some revision of those ethical precepts to accommodate the new reality.

And that is the program of the modern medical ethicist.

They have been at this for a long time (at least since the early 1990s), and the Sixth Edition of the ACP Ethics Manual – despite its largely benign language and even occasional retrograde pledges to the needs of the individual patient – advances the true aims of the medical ethicists to a new level. DrRich will provide three lines of evidence to support this contention.

First,

in its section on “Professionalism,” the new Ethics Manual defers specifically to a foundational document written by the ACP and published in 2002 entitled, “Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium: A Physician Charter.” That Charter, which DrRich has critiqued in detail, established a new ethical precept which physicians must now follow – and to which they must give equal weight to their ancient duty to the best interests of their patient. That new precept is to social justice – to a just distribution of healthcare resources.

To understand the real import of this new ethical precept – which is introduced in the Charter in a determinedly bland manner – we must do a brief exegesis of the Charter itself. Notably, the first sentence of the Charter, which attempts to explain just why such a new charter on medical professionalism is needed in the first place, says, “Physicians today are experiencing frustration as changes in the health care delivery systems in virtually all industrialized countries threaten the very nature and values of medical professionalism.”

While this sentence obviously expresses the utter frustration doctors were feeling at being coerced – at the time mainly by health insurers – to withhold expensive but potentially useful healthcare services from their patients, the document itself never spells this out. Indeed, after this passionate opening sentence, no reference to any particular frustration is made again. Rather the document immediately retreats into a bland prose, and one looks in vain for the authors to spell out the cause of the dire frustration that demands a restatement of medical professionalism.

But even though the document seems strangely reticent to say what frustration produced the very impetus for its creation, we can rely on the fact that the document must be designed to cure this mysterious frustration (whatever it is), and further, that the only substantial change in the document was an addition to the code of medical ethics, adding the requirement that physicians work for social justice. Making social justice an ethical mandate for individual physicians, one can only surmise, might help relieve some of the guilt (and some of the frustration) physicians feel when they are forced to engage in bedside rationing against their patients.

The blandness of the Charter is intentional, and was added at the last minute to “soften” the blow. In an ACP policy conference held in the summer of 2001, a much more inflammatory draft of this new Charter was presented to the membership for discussion. That penultimate version made the actual intent of the document far more explicit. It said that when making decisions regarding individual patients, doctors must “be aware that the decisions they make about individual patients have an impact on the resources available to others.”  In other words, it explicitly instructed bedside rationing. To the dismay of the ethicists who had presented the draft, several ACP members at that conference reacted quite negatively to it. (Who knew that doctors still gave so much weight to ancient, outdated ethical precepts?) Because of the uproar, the language of the document was softened before its official publication. While its import remained entirely unchanged, the document was “blanded-up.” In particular, the sentence explicitly spelling out just what the authors meant by “social justice” was removed. In making their final revision, however, the authors of the Charter managed to overlook the passionate tone of that (suddenly incongruent) opening sentence, and thus left an everlasting clue as to what the document was really intended to do.

To summarize, by the turn of the millennium doctors were being coerced to withhold healthcare from their patients at the bedside, and thus to violate their time-honored primary professional directive. The intent of the 2002 Charter on medical professionalism was to repair the problem (i.e., to cure the “frustration”), not by confronting the forces of evil doing the coercion, but rather, by simply changing medical ethics to make bedside rationing OK. And that’s just what the document did, though only after careful re-editing to make this radical change to medical ethics sound as benign as possible.

By explicitly endorsing the 2002 Charter on medical professionalism, the Sixth Edition of the ACP Ethics Manual thereby endorses healthcare rationing at the bedside – but it does so quietly, at arm’s length, so as not to stir up unwanted passions.

Second,

the publication of the new Ethics Manual is accompanied by an editorial written by Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, a celebrated medical ethicist, the brother of Rahm, and a special advisor on health policy to the White House. It is widely believed that Dr. Emanuel will have a lot to say about which medical experts are going to be appointed to Obamacare’s GOD panels (Government Operatives Deliberating) – the panels that will establish the formal “guidelines” to determine which patients will get what, when and how, “guidelines” which doctors will have to follow in every particular, or be subject to fines, loss of profession, and imprisonment.

It is therefore instructive that Dr. Emanuel is effusive in his praise of this new ACP Ethics Manual. He is especially delighted that the authors have placed a statement into a special “call-out” box, so nobody can miss it, demanding that physicians, as an ethical duty owed to society, must practice efficient, parsimonious, and cost-effective healthcare.

Emanuel notes that “These positions on efficiency, parsimony, and cost-effectiveness constitute an important shift, if not in ethics then in emphasis.” Dr. Emanuel need not dissemble. It’s a shift in ethics all right – just look at the title of the document.

In other words, dear reader, we have Dr. Emanuel, one of the Supreme Beings who will be directing the GOD panels, declaring that, thanks to the new ACP Ethics Manual, doctors have now fully accepted the proposition that it is a matter of medical ethics for “cost-effectiveness” – as determined by panels of hand-picked experts – to decide whether their patient will receive a potentially beneficial medical service.

(Judging from Dr. Emanuel’s reaction to their work product, if any of the authors of this new Ethics Manual had hoped their participation might serve as their audition for one of the GOD panels, it appears their strategy might work out just fine.)

Third,

the Ethics Manual contains the injunction that doctors practice medicine “parsimoniously.”  While Dr. Emanuel is enamored by and delighted with this word, DrRich finds it at least a little disturbing.

One might speculate that by this word the ACP’s medical ethicists mean to say that doctors ought to arrive at a care plan by applying the “theory of parsimony,” best known as Occam’s Razor. If so, they are urging doctors to error.

The theory of parsimony says that when a series of observations has more than one plausible explanation, the simplest of the available explanations should be considered the “best.” This method usually works quite well when one is devising a theory to explain some phenomenon whose explanation is not a matter of dire urgency. So, for instance, any cave man from the Paleolithic Age who was fond of Occam’s Razor would have concluded, from available observational data, that the sun revolves around the earth. This conclusion was wrong, but little harm was done by it. And when it became important for us to get the movements of the heavenly bodies right (for instance, when we decided to send men to the moon), we first took care to collect additional observational data (just to make sure), and thereby we discovered just in time (a mere few hundred years before launch) that, for a million years or so, our original conclusion had been mistaken.

But Occam’s Razor is less well suited for making medical decisions, that is, in cases where current clinical evidence is consistent with more than one explanation. Here, it is likely that with some effort a discoverable, definitive, correct answer could be achieved, and it is at least possible that always choosing the “simplest” possible explanation would lead the doctor to take action (or more likely, to withhold medical services) that would cause the patient to suffer harm. Sometimes the theory of parsimony can be applied to good effect in the practice of medicine; other times it will be a disaster. Deciding when to use it is a matter of medical judgment and medical experience, best decided locally by a specific doctor on behalf of a specific patient.

The theory of parsimony clearly should not be applied as a matter of course to all medical questions, perhaps not even in most medical questions. So it would seem a shame for the ACP’s Ethics Manual to decree (“without qualifiers,” as Dr. Emanuel approvingly notes) that as a matter of medical ethics, doctors must always do so.

But perhaps the authors were not referring to the “theory of parsimony” at all. Perhaps they were just using “parsimonious” as a synonym for “efficient.” If this is the case, their error was more along the lines of a Freudian slip. For “efficient” and “parsimonious” are simply not good synonyms. Better synonyms for parsimonious would include:

• excessively unwilling to spend,
• ungenerous,
• penurious,
• penny-pinching,
• miserly,
• sparing,
• grasping,
• tight,
• close,
• niggardly,
• illiberal,
• mean,
• avaricious,
• covetous, or
• tight-assed.

Efficient is to parsimonious as fondness is to lust, or as a gentle spring rain is to a deadly deluge. They may be in the same genus, but are of entirely different species.

Since the real synonyms for parsimonious are all quite descriptive of bedside healthcare rationing, DrRich submits that this carefully chosen and strongly praised word is every bit as appropriate to the occasion as Dr. Emanuel indicates. This is EXACTLY how our Central Authority wants doctors to practice medicine – parsimoniously.

In conclusion,

the wording of the new ACP Ethics Manual itself may be, with a few notable exceptions, inoffensive. But when we take the time to explore the derivation of this text, when we consider it in light of the overarching program of modern medical ethicists, and in light of the interpretations now being assigned to it by agents of the Central Authority, it is not difficult to discover its true meaning and its true significance. This document helps establish an ethical mandate for doctors to follow centralized clinical directives to the letter, and doctors who fail to comply will be guilty not only of some legalistic violation of “guidelines,” but also of behaving unethically. And almost anyone will tell you that unethical doctors are the lowest form of life; for them no punishment is too harsh, and the tiniest mercy is too kind.

This, of course, is just what we should have expected.

This past summer, DrRich wrote a post on the utter arrogance of the public health experts who are urging the FDA – and international bodies of busybodies – to mandate a policy of strict sodium restriction across the globe.

DrRich attempted to show how such a broad-based salt restriction at this juncture is ill-advised for three reasons. First, the conclusion that a population-wide salt restriction would actually do any good is not based on any actual prospective studies, but on a contrived extrapolation of observational data. Second, there is some evidence that a salt restriction would be harmful to at least a substantial minority of people, even if the overall effect on the population turns out to be positive. And third, there is good reason to believe that the degree of sodium restriction which is being recommended by the public health experts is below the level which is dictated by human physiology.

Perhaps salt restriction for the entire population will turn out to be a good idea. But perhaps not. So in his previous post, DrRich was advocating a prospective, randomized controlled trial to test this proposition before just going ahead and inflicting it upon hundreds of millions of Americans.

And now, as it happens, in recent weeks new studies have been published which question the safety of salt restriction for the whole population. In fact, five studies have been published just this year suggesting that salt restriction might be unsafe.

The latest, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association,  suggests that when you compare cardiovascular events (such as heart attack and stroke) to sodium intake, the incidence of those events follows a “J” curve. That is, cardiovascular events are lowest at an “optimal” level of sodium intake. But if sodium intake goes above that optimal level – or if it goes below it – the incidence of cardiovascular events increases.

According to this study, the “optimal” level of daily sodium intake is 4000 – 5999 mg of sodium per day. Cardiac outcomes worsen for those with sodium intakes above or below those values.

And, of course, the public health experts are recommending sodium intakes far below the 4000 mg threshold. They recommend (and urge world governments to enforce) sodium restrictions of 1500 mg per day for the people they consider to be at high risk (which amounts to about half of us), and restrictions of 2300 mg per day for the rest of us.

This kind of restriction would place everyone on an unenviable portion of the J curve, according to this new study, and would risk exposing all of us to an excess of cardiovascular disease.

The public health experts, of course, will not take this slander lying down, and accordingly have been quick to respond. Interestingly, their response sounds a lot like the response of the global warming experts whenever someone has the audacity to introduce new evidence that questions some of their conclusions.

Heartwire quotes Dr Graham MacGregor of London’s Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine (and a major sodium restriction guru) as saying, “[These new studies] are a minor irritation that causes us a bit of aggravation, and we have to talk to journalists about it, because they are not interested in news saying salt is dangerous.” MacGregor insists that the need for global sodium restriction (like global warming) is a settled issue.  “What [these irritating investigators] fail to understand is that the FDA is not asking for evidence about why salt should be reduced, they are asking how it should be reduced.” So apparently, new data need not apply.  It is neither being sought, nor will it be accepted.

Other experts have pointed out that these new studies urging caution on restricting salt were not the kind of prospective, randomized controlled trials that are so valued in medicine, so their results should not be taken too seriously.

DrRich might be more inclined to agree with this admonition if the studies that suggest we ought to employ severe, widespread salt restrictions were randomized, controlled trials. But they, also, are not.

What we have is two sets of very confusing observational data that can be interpreted to say different things. It may be true that a severe population-wide salt restriction would be a huge boon to mankind. But it may also be true that it would harm more people than it would help – or that it would harm and help about the same number, so the overall results would be the same.

The fact is, we just don’t know.

We have already seen the harm that can be done when we allow public health experts to launch major population-wide dietary changes, without adequately studying what their effects will be. Especially given the increasing evidence of the harms that might be done by it, we are nuts if we allow the arrogant expert class to enforce a salt restriction program on all of us, before we adequately study its likely results.

Of course, the whole thrust of our new healthcare system is to allow the experts to practice medicine on the whole population.  So urging caution or even a certain amount of circumspection on this newly-empowered expert class is destined to be a futile exercise.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force created another hub-bub recently when they released their latest, updated recommendations on whether men should routinely have PSA testing for the early detection of prostate cancer. The USPSTF’s recommendation was simple and straightforward: No.

News reports on this new recommendation have fairly accurately portrayed the arguments on both sides. Proponents of PSA testing are in an uproar because prostate cancer kills many men, and its early detection makes it easier to treat. Without PSA testing, the early detection of prostate cancer is difficult and often impossible. But those siding with the USPSTF point to randomized clinical trials showing no significant reduction in mortality in populations of men who have had PSA screening, and further, that men who have PSA screening end up having a lot of very unpleasant and expensive medical procedures which can leave them with life-altering side effects.

DrRich is by no means an expert on prostate cancer or PSA testing, but as it happens he is an American male who is within the age group addressed by this new recommendation. So he indeed has a legitimate interest in whether the USPSTF has made a wise decision or not.

To help him decide whether this new recommendation is a reasonable one, DrRich has gone to the source: to the document published by the USPSTF itself in announcing its new recommendation. Helpfully, the USPSTF has laid out in detail the specific clinical studies it relied upon, and the rationale it used, to synthesize the results of those studies into a concrete recommendation.

The USPSTF document points out two major conclusions which can be gleaned from the medical literature on PSA screening. First, when PSA screening is applied to large populations of men, it is difficult to demonstrate a reduction in mortality. Of two large clinical trials comparing men randomized to PSA screening to those randomized to “standard care,” one found that PSA screening yields a relatively small but statistically significant reduction in cancer-related deaths, but the other showed no mortality benefit. So, given a large population of men eligible for screening, doing PSA testing appears to yield a benefit that is either small or non-existent. And as a result, from a public health standpoint a recommendation to do widespread PSA screening is simply not justifiable based on current evidence. And this finding accounts for the USPSTF’s new recommendation.

But the second major conclusion that is revealed by the medical literature is that, for men in whom screening has actually detected early prostate cancer, subsequent treatment significantly reduces mortality. This result addresses one of the big questions often raised about early detection of prostate cancer, namely, whether the cancers detected by PSA screening actually require treatment. Many of these early cancers apparently never cause death, so many have speculated that “watchful waiting” might be a reasonable course of action rather than aggressive prostate treatment. But the USPSTF’s review of the relevant studies shows that when early-stage prostate cancer is identified, the best clinical trials available show a significant reduction in cancer-related death and all-cause mortality with either surgical prostatectomy or radiation therapy.

As the backdrop for these two major conclusions, the USPSTF strongly emphasizes the drawbacks of PSA screening. This screening often leads men to experience some very bad outcomes from prostate biopsies, or from therapy for prostate cancer. The very nasty complications resulting from these procedures are all too frequent, and are very difficult to even think about let alone experience. Furthermore, pursuing all those  positive PSA tests is extraordinarily expensive for the healthcare system. The reasoning offered by the USPSTF in making their new recommendation relies heavily on the price which men must pay, in terms of complications, in pursuing the results of a positive screening test.

DrRich has long been disturbed by the state of the art of both prostate cancer screening and prostate cancer treatment, by the lack of obvious progress in improving these things, and by the seeming complaisance with which many urologists seem to accept the status quo. PSA screening appears far too sensitive (too many false positives, leading to too many biopsies). Prostate biopsies often yield both false positive results (detecting cancers that are probably clinically meaningless) and false negative results (missing cancers that are clinically important). And the numerous treatments available for treating prostate cancer (all of which are very unpleasant) have not been rigorously compared, leaving the various “camps” of urologists to argue that their pet treatment is the best one, and all those other urologists have their heads up their ass.

All this confusion and uncertainty places the patient faced with the prospect of whether to have a PSA test, or worse, with newly-diagnosed prostate cancer, in a complete quandary, and apparently with no objective means to resolve what he ought to do next. But despite all these shortcomings, the urology community has aggressively turned PSA screening and the cascade of uncertainties (and resultant procedures) that flow from it into a burgeoning industry, to the extent that one must wonder how badly these specialists want to clarify the current muddle. And for this reason, it is difficult to take the loud objections being made by the American Urological Association against the USPSTF’s new recommendations very seriously.

So from a public health standpoint, the USPSTF recommendations on PSA screening seem reasonable to DrRich.

However.

DrRich keeps coming back to the second major conclusion from the USPSTF’s analysis of the medical literature on prostate cancer screening: Even with all the drawbacks associated with PSA screening, and even with all the conjectures about whether these early prostate cancers really need to be treated after all, it turns out that if prostate cancer is detected by some screening technique, then treating that cancer saves lives. And DrRich notes that while the USPSTF dutifully describes this result in the body of their report, they do not mention it in the Abstract of their report, and they do not seem to have given it much weight, if any, in their final recommendations.

But it seems to DrRich that this is an important result, and ought to be taken into account. It should not be simply brushed off as irrelevant, or unworthy of notice. It begs to be explained.

How can it be that, on one hand, offering PSA screening to a large population of men does not seem to result in much overall mortality benefit, whereas on the other hand, if you do find prostate cancer when you screen for it, then treating that cancer significantly reduces mortality?

Most likely the explanation lies in the dilution effect. The moderate (but statistically significant) benefit of treating early prostate cancer is washed out when those patients are included in a much larger population of men who are eligible for screening, and who may or may not have prostate cancer, which may or may not be detected adequately by current screening techniques, and if it is detected may or may not be treated.

To see how such a dilution effect might operate, let’s consider seat belts. Everyone knows that seat belts save lives. So let’s do a study to prove it. One way to do this would be to compare the mortality rates of people who are in automobile accidents, according to whether they were or were not wearing seat belts. Odds are it would be fairly easy to show a mortality benefit with seat belts. But now let’s compare the mortality rate of all drivers over a 5 or 10 year period according to whether they were wearing seat belts, regardless of whether they were ever in an automobile accident. DrRich suspects you would not be able to demonstrate a mortality benefit with seat belts in this second study.

The PSA screening studies that the USPSTF relied on to make their PSA recommendations are analogous to this second seat belt study. The prostate cancer treatment studies that did show a mortality benefit are analogous to the first seat belt study.

Please note that DrRich is not comparing PSA screening to wearing seat belts. Wearing seat belts does not lead to a lot of unnecessary expense, nor does it create life-altering side effects. PSA screening, given the state of the art, is neither inexpensive nor benign.

But despite its major drawbacks, PSA screening does detect early prostate cancer. And if you measure outcomes from the point where the prostate cancer is actually diagnosed (instead of from the point where you decide to do PSA testing), survival is measurably increased by its early detection and treatment.

So the dichotomy is explained. From a public health standpoint, where you have to decide what the result will be on a large population of individuals if some screening test is implemented, it does not make sense to do PSA screening. But if you are an individual who might have prostate cancer, in whom the early detection of that cancer might save your life, then it might make sense to do the PSA screening. (Whether it does or not depends on how you, the individual, assign relative weights to the notion of dying from prostate cancer vs. the inconvenience, expense, pain, and possibly horrible side effects from PSA testing and what it might lead to.)

So while from a public health standpoint it would be a mistake to recommend widespread PSA screening, from an individual standpoint either decision – to have or forgo PSA screening, depending on how you yourself weigh the tradeoffs – would be entirely reasonable.

But individuals are not allowed to decide this for themselves. This is no longer the kind of decision which individual doctors and patients are supposed to be making any more. In fact, it is now illegal to do so.

And this, Dear Reader, describes the problem with the USPSTF decision on PSA screening. For, in fact, the USPSTF is no longer making mere “recommendations,” which doctors and patients might take into account if they wish as they decide whether some preventive healthcare measure is right for an individual patient. Rather, the USPSTF rulings now determine whether you and I, as individuals, will or will not receive that preventive measure.

Obamacare, which is now the law of the land, makes the USPSTF the final arbiter of which preventive services are to be covered by private insurers (Section 2713), by Medicare (Section 4105), and by Medicaid (Section 4106). Only those that have achieved a grade of A or B by the USPSTF will be covered. And if you believe you will be able to purchase for yourself PSA screening (or any other medical service which Obamacare has decided not to cover) you have not been paying attention. Perhaps you can do so today (if you’re not on Medicare or Medicaid), but probably not for long.

What all the news outlets have forgotten to mention, in their coverage of the PSA controversy, is that the USPSTF has been officially converted from a panel that simply makes recommendations which doctors and insurance companies can take or leave alone, into a panel that determines definitively what is covered and what is not – and indeed, into the chief tool by which our leaders will seek to withhold expensive preventive services.

And while in the particular case of PSA testing, he is not particularly sorry to see the new USPSTF recommendation, DrRich submits that, given the general nature of medical screening tests, it is child’s play to set up a clinical trial that would “prove” (given the expense of the test, the false positives, the false negatives, the side effects of the test itself, the side effects and expense of the follow-up tests needed to see whether a positive screening test is truly positive, the expense and side effects of the treatment that will be used if the diagnosis is actually confirmed, the relative efficacy and inefficacy of that treatment, not to mention the dilution effects of having to screen a large number of individuals to find the relatively few who actually have the condition of concern and will benefit from its treatment) that there is no preventive screening test you could name that produces an overall benefit to the population.

DrRich has long predicted that the brilliant people in our news media will be continually “surprised” each time some heretofore sacred medical screening test is declared by the all-powerful USPSTF to be, after all, useless.

This being the case, can we just stop pretending that Obamacare is all about prevention, disband the USPSTF altogether, stop funding any screening tests whatsoever and any research being done to develop new ones, and call it a day? That would be much more transparent, not to mention cheaper, than stifling preventive medicine in the painfully slow and deceptive way we are doing it today.

While Grand Rounds is normally the highlight of everybody’s week here in the medical blogosphere, this time it’s different. This week, we are all – each and every one of us  – completely distracted by the most wonderful sense of expectation and joy, to the exclusion of virtually every other human emotion. For DrRich, at least, the feeling puts him in mind of the giddy anticipation he experienced on, say, his 5th Christmas eve, when he was still young enough to consider Santa Claus a magical-but-real agent of earthly delights. (This was before DrRich realized that Santa, being obese, is actually a great menace to society.)

For this, dear reader, is the week when President Obama will turn his considerable powers of intellect, at long last, to the issue of jobs. The President indicated to us more than a month ago that he would, in his own good time, present to us his program for fixing the horrific and prolonged unemployment problem which now affects most American families in some way. And thus realizing that a solution is finally at hand, we in the great unwashed masses have waited, as patiently as we could, through earthquakes, hurricanes, Martha’s Vinyard vacations, and numerous pre-season football games, for the President to tell us the Answer. And, summoning together a Joint Session of Congress – a venue most often reserved for declarations of war and similar life-altering policy initiatives, thus confirming the momentous nature of his coming words – he will finally proclaim to us the Good News, a mere two days from now. One can cut the anticipation with a knife.

So, while it is indeed an honor to be hosting Grand Rounds during this historic week. DrRich must admit to finding it a little difficult to concentrate his efforts. No doubt readers will likewise find it a challenge to turn their attention away from the Big Event long enough to peruse the following posts – the best of the medical blogosphere this week.

But be assured that there is good stuff to follow. So, if you find yourself incapable of focusing your attention on Grand Rounds at the moment, simply bookmark this page, and return to it once your sense of soaring happiness returns (as it inevitably must) to a more normal state. Be assured that this week’s entries are timeless enough to outlive your ecstasy (an emotion which – alas! – to be effective, must always be transient).

So let us begin.

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DrRich – having been informed not long ago, by an actual U.S. Attorney who at that moment had him under a form of official duress, that the DOJ is well aware of this blog and the general tenor of its content – always likes to mention early in any long post (so that his minders do not have to read the whole thing) any items that might be helpful to the Administration. Accordingly, we open Grand Rounds this week with the announcement, posted in The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, of the 2011 Charles Prize for Poetry. Dr. Charles has been hosting this prestigious contest – which seeks and awards excellence in poetry touching on health, science or medicine – for some time now, and it has proven to be an exceedingly popular annual event.

In addition to the significant intrinsic merits that accompany the Charles Prize for Poetry, DrRich must note that Dr. Charles is also awarding a not-inconsiderable cash prize to the winners. That is, he is creating what, in our present economic environment, must be considered damned-near jobs. Encouraging employment in the career of poetry is something, DrRich thinks, the President should seriously consider before Thursday night, lest he be tempted to make the huge mistake of attempting to whip up enthusiasm yet again for Green Jobs. (In the wake of the collapse just last week of the heavily-government-subsidized and heavily-Obama-promoted Solyndra Company, and of at least two other companies that received large federal funds for Green Jobs, treading that dead ground again would merely reveal that he is entirely bereft of ideas.) The Administration ought to thank DrRich, and especially Dr. Charles, for this critically important advice. Encouraging poesy, instead of Green Jobs, would demonstrate the kind of new thinking we are all looking for from our President at this critical juncture.

At Dr. Malpani’s Blog, Dr. M. outlines his 3-step approach for helping his patients understand the intricate concepts of in-vitro fertilization. First, you describe how the thing is supposed to work when everything is functioning normally (the “thing” in this case being the human reproductive system). Then, you describe to the patient where the system is breaking down in his/her case. And finally, you describe the options available for mitigating the breakdown. Dr. Malpani’s system, which he points out is generalizable, is aimed at creating a consensus for action when faced with a complex problem.

DrRich will only remark that Dr. M’s system, which works well enough for problems based in human physiology, is proving pretty worthless for problems based in the more social sciences, such as economics. This is because of a fundamental disagreement, among the debaters, on how the economy is “supposed to work when everything is functioning normally.” Progressives and conservatives have very different ideas about this. So Dr. M’s approach, which requires both logic and a fundamental consensus on what constitutes “normal” behavior, is unsuitable to non-physiologic systems.

Dr. Val at Better Health posts a recent interview with Dr. Dori Carlson, president of the American Optometric Association, regarding the importance of screening children for subtle but significant vision problems. (Dr. Val and Dr. Dori are referring here to the kinds of vision problems that involve optics, and not the kind suffered by our political leaders.) The type of gross vision screening which is conducted by most schools misses the majority of these vision problems in children, and those undetected vision problems not infrequently lead to impaired learning. Also, they often lead to misdiagnoses and inappropriate treatment, likely including the misdiagnosis of ADHD. (Missed vision problems constitute only one of the causes for the explosion in ADHD diagnoses in recent years. A more common cause, in our overly-feminized schools, is being a boy. Indeed, as nearly as DrRich can tell, being a boy today is a disease; they have drugs for it and everything.) In any case, if you are a parent of a school-aged child, you should strongly consider having your child’s vision checked by an ophthalmologist or optometrist – especially if somebody wants to put him on Ritalin.

Henry Stern at InsureBlog tells us the good news and bad news about a new study related to heart attacks. He notes that heart attack victims are receiving definitive therapy in American hospitals much more quickly than they were just a few years ago. And when you are having a heart attack, minutes count – the longer that coronary artery is occluded, the more permanent damage is done to your heart, and the higher your odds of death or disability. So the diminished delay to treatment is good news. As usual, though, there is bad news attached. DrRich, always the sunny optimist, does not wish to repeat the bad news. You can go to the InsureBlog to read it for yourself.

The ACP Internist reports a study showing that 80% of today’s doctors look up on-line information in front of their patients. DrRich, who admits to being an Old Fart, does not find this surprising, since young physicians these days are, well, young. And young people are on-line all of the time, reporting their every trivial thought and mundane action instantaneously to the Cloud. (If Andy Warhol were alive today he’d be talking about our 15 minutes of anonymity.) But you don’t have to be a young doctor to take up these new habits. It appears from this new survey that doctors of all age groups have ritualistically placed an LCD screen between themselves and their patients. In so doing, they have awarded to those distant, expert panels – the ones spinning out all those guidelines, pay-for-performance checklists, marching orders, &c – their appropriate and rightful physical position, that is, directly interposed between doctor and patient. This is more than mere symbolism, but the symbolism is delicious.

But, dear reader, please do not be too critical of today’s doctors. If you yourself were a savvy modern physician, realizing that you could go to jail if you do what you think is medically appropriate before checking with the Authorities to find out if it is also allowable, you’d have a computer screen in front of your face too, and you’d be looking stuff up in front of your patients the entire time they were blathering on about their symptoms or whatever. DrRich worries for the 20% of doctors (likely, his fellow Old Farts) who haven’t “gotten it” yet.

Beth Gainer at Calling the Shots makes an important observation about the two classic narratives to which all victims of breast cancer are assigned – the narrative of the triumphant hero, and the narrative of the courageous and noble victim. Ms. Gainer’s observation is that most women with breast cancer do not fit either of these prescribed narratives. Many women are thus left feeling guilty or diminished when they find that their experience is not meeting with society’s expectations. Ms. Gainer is absolutely correct, and indeed, her observation is generalizable. The same thing occurs whenever society’s designated narrative-makers assign a range of permissible attitudes, thoughts and behaviors to any defined group. Mercy on any member of the group who falls outside those designated norms.

David E. Williams at the venerable Health Business Blog addresses the question of how we – society – will cope with the next big trend in the drug industry – the development of “niche” drugs, drugs that are suitable for only a relatively small number of patients and which, therefore, are exceedingly expensive to develop and market. David goes directly to the real question – the problem of niche drugs makes the issue of healthcare rationing unavoidable.

So far, of course, we are doing our healthcare rationing covertly, and in the case of niche drugs that usually means interpreting clinical results in such a way as to minimize their potential benefits. We do this by saying that Drug X “only increases survival by 4 months,” and ignoring the fact that “4 months” is an average value, and that while many patients have no benefit at all, a non-negligible minority may live a lot longer. The question, “Is it worth $50,000 for only four more months of life?” is different from the question, “Is it worth $50,000 to have a realistic shot at living several extra years?” Covert rationing causes us to frame the question in such a way that the answer to any question beginning with “Is it worth. . .” is always, “no.”

At the Road to Hellth, Douglas Perednia, one of the best analysts of health policy writing today, looks at the rationale for the onerous penalties which are required under Obamacare for hospitals whose patients are readmitted at higher than the average readmission rates. Perednia describes the bogus math which the Feds are apparently using to determine what appropriate readmission rates ought to be – and points out the irony of requiring doctors to behave in an “evidence-based” fashion, while the Feds themselves are using frivolous statistics to dole out the equivalent of the NCAA Death Penalty to our hospitals.

Steven Seay, PhD discusses what ought to be second nature to any clinician – applying the principles of the scientific method to clinical practice. That is: gather the necessary data to formulate an hypothesis; institute therapy based on that hypothesis; measure the results of that therapy; revise the hypothesis to reflect this new data; repeat as necessary. This is the way clinical practice should be done. DrRich is happy to learn that it is still apparently OK for clinical psychologists to function in this manner. For physicians, especially PCPs, the scientific method has become forcibly compressed to: make a diagnosis; treat according to the guidelines. While the patient might not do so well with this new method, the physician will be OK, since “quality” will be measured according to one’s compliance with the guidelines. Measuring the actual results of the treatment, of course, would only lead to trouble, and in most cases will be avoided.

James Gault, MD, of the blog Retired Doc’s Thoughts, is a long-time champion of classical medical ethics (as opposed to the New Age medical ethics now formally espoused by all the major professional organizations).  As such, Dr. Gault often deconstructs arguments being published by modern medical ethicists supporting these New Age ethics, which require doctors to act for the benefit of the collective rather than for the benefit of their individual patients. In this post, Dr. Gault gives a very effective what-for to Professor Fuchs of Stanford, who, once again, has published a paper advancing the bankrupt argument that what’s good for the collective is necessarily good for the individual. These kinds of vapid arguments may fool the Whippersnappers, but they’re not fooling us Old Farts.

The ACP Hospitalist notes that, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a “grey market” is developing for life-saving medications that have been in severe short supply for the past few years. A grey market, DrRich thinks, is like a black market, but less illegal – though it is possible they are referring to Old Farts who are merchants. In any case, the ISMP says the grey market is price-gouging hospitals that need those important drugs, and have nowhere else to buy them. The solution, according to the ISMP, is (among other things) to empower the FDA to manage drug shortages and tighten regulations for drug distribution.

The growing, widespread shortage of important medications is indeed a bad problem. We should look for a solution to this problem. Shortages of any product occur when it costs companies more to make the product than they can get for it in the marketplace. Onerous regulatory policies by the FDA which, in the name of product safety, have greatly increased the cost of doing business for pharmaceutical companies, along with recent de facto price controls on generic drugs, have combined to make it economically unfeasible for drug companies to expend large resources to manufacture these drugs. It seems doubtful that piling on even more regulations will improve the situation. And attacking the grey markets will simply drive them further into the dark (since black markets are nature’s way of providing a product when governments act to limit it). Given the expected 500,000 pages of new regulations being conjured up out of the Obamacare legislation, drug shortages are merely the first of many critical medical shortages we will be seeing in the coming years. So it will be instructive to watch how our leaders handle this problem.

In any case, from the job-creation standpoint, DrRich believes there will be many employment opportunities in coming years in sundry black markets related to healthcare. Many skills will be needed, some of which should be quite exciting!

At the Prepared Patient Forum, Trudy Lieberman writes a post entitled “Health Insurance, Meet the Jolly Green Giant,” in which she discusses the new, patient-friendly labels that are supposed to accompany health insurance policies under Obamacare beginning no later than 2014. The labels sound like a good idea, but as Ms. Lieberman points out, there will be problems. For instance, for the Feds to mandate transparency in labeling is unlikely to be all that helpful when, at the same time, they often mandate utter secrecy on the part of providers (for instance, in creating severe anti-trust penalties for doctors who reveal the fees they have negotiated with insurance carriers). But as always, results are far less important than simply meaning well.

Sharp Incisions, a blog written by a self-described “fledgling” medical student, has sent in an affecting post about scrubbing in on a unique surgical case – the harvesting of six vital organs for transplantation from a patient who has been declared brain dead. DrRich prays that Dr. Incisions will maintain for a long time the same sense of wonder and gratitude, expressed in this post, for the gift of life.

A medical student who blogs anonymously at the D.O.ctor Blog, describes her first experience participating in cardiopulmonary resuscitation when it actually counted. DrRich, who in his days as a cardiac electrophysiologist ran hundreds of these things, and who became convinced over the years that three people was the optimal number to run a “code,” admits to being a little taken aback by this student’s description of the event, which sounds like it must have been as complex to coordinate as a Busby Berkeley production number. No wonder she was a little astonished by her experience. DrRich supposes that this must be the new-style CPR mandated by some new guideline or other, and would not be surprised to learn later this week that CPR procedures requiring 15 participants is part of the President’s new Jobs Plan.

Speaking of sudden death, one of DrRich’s recurrent themes here on the CRB is that sudden death is a great boon to our healthcare system (since not only is sudden death itself very cheap, but also it tends to remove individuals who would otherwise continue collecting Social Security, and who tend to have expensive chronic heart disease), and that therefore the government will tend to stifle the prevention of sudden death any time it can. Accordingly, Dr. Wes tells us that the Feds are about to further limit the use of the Zoll wearable defibrillator. Doctors have taken to using this device in high-risk patients during the first month or so after a heart attack, since guidelines specify that ICDs (implantable defibrillators) must not be implanted during this interval. Since sudden death is particularly likely during that first month, the Zoll device is being used as a “bridge to ICD.” Obviously, sudden death being the healthcare system’s friend, this must not be permitted. And so, Dr. Wes points out, soon it will not be.

At the HealthAGEnda Blog of the John A. Hartford Foundation, Marcus Escobedo describes how his father is coping with the decisions that need to be made as he deals with recurrent prostate cancer. Helping elderly patients deal with health issues is the thrust of Mr. Escobedo’s work at Hartford, and his new personal experience, he tells us, drives home the point. Specifically, Escobedo works to assure that elderly patients are considered to be more than just the sum of their disease and their age. DrRich is sorry to have to point out that no less an expert on American healthcare than President Obama has explicitly disagreed with this approach, and on national television to boot. Perhaps when he said this the President was suffering under the influence of teleprompterpenia, and perhaps if he had an opportunity to meet with Mr. Escobedo over a beer in the Rose Garden, he would possibly begin to revise his position to one that is more compatible with the mission of the Harford Foundation. On behalf of America’s Old Farts, DrRich would certainly hope so.

Dr. Thomas Pane writes in the Business, Surgery & Medicine Blog about tantrums, specifically, the kind occasionally thrown by surgeons in the operating suite. His post carries an important Labor Day lesson for anyone who hopes to make a career in the medical field in the coming years, so pay attention:

Everyone can agree that throwing tantrums in the operating room is never a good thing, and that quite often, it is a very bad thing. But Dr. Pane points out that, counterproductive as tantrums often are, they are nonetheless not the worst possible way in which a surgeon can express his/her utter frustration at a bureaucracy that blithely conspires to disrupt surgical procedures at critical moments. He reminds us, once again, that the biggest handicap one can ever have when working in an environment in which bureaucratic mud has fouled every gear is: giving a sh*t. So, while Dr. Pane may or may not agree, here’s the lesson: If surgeons would simply adopt the apathetic, indifferent attitude that classically characterizes long-term survivors in work environments mired by bureaucracy, all would be well.

Jaqueline writes Laika’s MedLiblog, a blog dedicated to medical information science. She submits a post entitled, “PubMed’s Higher Sensitivity than OVID MEDLINE… & other Published Clichés,” in which she shows how medical researchers doing literature searches for, among other things, meta-analyses, will stumble upon various “anomalies” in their searches of the PubMed and OVID databases, and then write additional, CV-padding papers about those anomalies. Jaqueline points out that these so-called “anomalies” are actually well-documented “clichés,” which are well-known to information specialists and anyone else who is competent in doing comprehensive literature searches. In other words, Jaqueline has documented that these meta-analysis researchers are rank amateurs at doing the most critical step in conducting meta-analyses – searching the literature for all the appropriate published studies. DrRich has always mistrusted meta-analyses, and Jaqueline has helpfully identified yet another reason to justify such mistrust. He thanks Jaqueline, and whoever planted those database anomalies which allow us to identify potentially incompetent meta-analysis researchers.

Nicholas Fogelson of Academic OB/GYN writes about taking care of the dying Jehovah’s Witness patient, or rather, taking care of the Jehovah’s Witness patient whose illness is potentially curable but who is dying because he or she refuses to accept blood products. DrRich can attest to how very difficult it is for a doctor to respect a patient’s religion when doing so results in their death. Dr. Fogelson’s description of his evolving attitude regarding this dilemma is compelling.

Need to be uplifted after reading the above post? Read Jordan Grumet’s submission from his blog, In My Humble Opinion. It’s brief and beautifully written, and it reminds us that sometimes our efforts as doctors – which all too often seem futile – can pay off in unimagined ways.

Pranab at the Scepticemia blog points to a news story about a medical school in Mumbai selling seats (that is, entry to medical school) to the highest bidder. He strongly objects to this practice, even though he postulates that his objection will make some of his readers call him “a leftist commie” (which DrRich finds to be the most common kind). DrRich does not agree with Pranab’s (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion that it is America’s fault that Mumbai medical schools are selling seats. (It is actually only George Bush’s fault.) But DrRich does agree entirely that the practice itself is an abomination. Indeed, we can all agree that entry to any career which requires a high degree of skill, talent, and/or intelligence ought to depend on merit, and nothing but merit. Can we not? Good.

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DrRich will end by noting that he is finishing this Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Edition of Grand Rounds during the waning moments of Labor Day, which causes him to fondly recall those long-ago days of yesteryear, when the U.S. still had plenty of steel mills and DrRich was a card-carrying member of the United Steelworkers of America, and the thought of attending medical school had not yet penetrated his still-empty head. And he recalls how, while he was working one day as a lowly laborer, a union boss came over to him to explain (after DrRich had complained about it) the utility of his spending three painful days moving a large pile of slag, employing only shovel-and-wheelbarrow technology, from one location to another – AND THEN BACK AGAIN.  Now, those were the days when we knew how to make jobs!

Say, whatever happened to those steel mills, anyway?

DrRich considers it his responsibility to point out to his readers certain truths related to modern American healthcare which may not be obvious to everyone, and which the fine people in the mainstream press choose not to mention.

Be honest. If it weren’t for DrRich, would you be aware that the only reason Obamacare became the law of the land is that the private insurance companies needed it in order to have any hope of long term survival?  Would you understand that the Progressive healthcare system to which we are now legally committed inherently requires all of the following things (while loudly proclaiming the opposite): ending the classic doctor-patient relationship; preventing individuals from spending their own money on their own healthcare; killing off the practice of primary care medicine; to the furthest extent possible, limiting preventive medicine; and stifling medical innovation?

One thinks not.

And so, DrRich hopes you will pay attention as he reveals yet another poorly-appreciated truth about our new healthcare system. Namely, it has become the case that maintaining your own wellness is not merely something which would be desirable, something you ought to do, or at least something you ought to want to do. It is now your duty.

You owe it to society to maintain your wellness, to take every step at your disposal to keep yourself from needing to consume healthcare resources. You owe it because healthcare is now a collective responsibility. And if your chosen actions (or inactions) cause you to become unwell, and if your unwellness causes you to consume healthcare resources which otherwise might have been available to individuals who (unlike yourself) became ill through no fault of their own, and if such faultless individuals subsequently suffered or died as a consequence of your failure to honor your duty, well then – that would make you no different from any other common criminal whose selfish actions produce harm to their innocent victims.

Maintaining your wellness is not a nice-to-have; it is your non-negotiable obligation.

You have been told that your wellness is very important to the caring people who will run our new healthcare system. And indeed, it is. So you will, by law, be “entitled” to annual, detailed “wellness checks,” provided by a dedicated team of healthcare workers, who will assess (and record) your efforts to maintain your own wellness, and then will give you all the instruction you need to alter whatever suboptimal behaviors you are displaying. The results of these annual wellness checks will be entered into a federally-approved universal electronic medical record, so that any healthcare provider, anywhere, at any time, will have a complete record of the trajectory of your state of wellness over the years – and of the degree of your compliance with the instructions you have received for maintaining that wellness.

Of course, if you elect to forgo the annual wellness checks to which you are entitled, that information (i.e. that you cared so little for your wellness that you couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it) will also be maintained in the universal electronic records.

Then, when you become ill 10 or 20 years from now, your records can be consulted to decide to what extent your illness can be considered self-induced. For, when resources are scarce, the only moral thing to do is to distribute them according to who is the most deserving.

Most readers are now thinking that DrRich is paranoid. Guilty as charged. However, DrRich’s paranoia, regarding the kinds of behaviors of which our Central Authority is capable, is based on hard experience. Indeed, it is evidence-based.

Still, DrRich is enough of a realist to understand that it is unreasonable to ask his readers to just trust him here. Instead, let’s examine patterns of behavior, regarding supposedly self-induced disease, which our society is already displaying. The best example, one which DrRich has written about extensively, is obesity.

We are witnessing a sustained and ongoing campaign to demonize the obese. Consider: While we are universally urged to stifle any impulsive speech or sentiments which, by any stretch of the daintiest of sensibilities, might make any member of any group (however you choose to define a group) the least bit uncomfortable, it is perfectly OK to castigate the obese, loudly and often. We can say about the obese anything we like.  Screw their feelings. It is perfectly fine to insist that it is the obese – gluttonous, lazy, self-indulgent, slothful fat people – who are driving our healthcare spending off a cliff. It is acceptable to publish ridiculously flawed papers in respected scientific journals proving that global warming is caused by the obese (thus pinning upon them the responsibility for upcoming catastrophes of unimagined proportions), and demonstrating that obesity is a contagious disease (which will justify any actions we may choose to take to concentrate the obese into special camps).

A person’s choice to allow themselves to get fat already justifies more than mere words of castigation. Under the British Health Service (the model to which Dr. Berwick and other of our current healthcare heroes openly aspire), the obese (along with smokers, another group of selfish sub-humans who use an unfair share of healthcare) are now being removed from the waiting lists for medical services.* By virtue of their obesity (and the lack of social responsibility their obesity indicates), fat people have forfeited their equal access to healthcare.

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*Removing the fat from the waiting lists has at least two beneficial effects. It punishes them, of course, for their selfish refusal to maintain their own wellness. But it also reduces the long waiting lists that exist in Britain for medical services, closer to the target waiting times which the government has been promising its citizens for decades.
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Demonizing the obese has many advantages. Chief among these is that the obese are easy to spot. In contrast to the Jews of Nazi Germany, one does not have to sew a Star of David to their jackets to know which individuals are wrecking the culture. By just walking down the street (not that fat people do all that much walking, lazy SOBs) they reveal themselves, by their unsightly corpulence, to be one of those people who are ruining the healthcare system for the rest of us. And we svelter, more worthy citizens can look upon them with the scorn they deserve.

Especially now that we have so many programs and policies aimed at preventing obesity – putting apple slices in Happy Meals, publishing calorie counts in restaurants, being lectured at by First Ladies and skinny movie stars, &c., – anyone who still chooses to remain obese despite all this abundant assistance must be especially contemptible.

Perhaps most useful of all, in the long run, is the fact that real, honest-to-goodness, health-threatening obesity almost always has a strong genetic component. When we learn to demonize the obese, we are learning that wellness is a duty even if your genes (or some other force that is largely beyond your control) mitigates against it.

The obese, therefore, are the perfect target. Thanks to them, we are teaching ourselves that it is right and proper to disdain individuals who are leading less than exemplary lives.

Once we have learned this lesson well, it should be relatively easy for us to apply the same kind of disdain to others who who fail to honor their duty to maintain their own wellness. Most of these scurrilous individuals will not be so obvious to spot as fat people.  But at the end of the day, they will reveal themselves in the ultimate manner – they eventually will fall sick. And by their diseases we shall know them.

For the past several years, our healthcare experts have been busy declaring more and more illnesses to be “preventable.” And if an illness is preventable, and an individual fails to prevent it – well, what more do you need? That person has obviously failed to perform their sacred duty to society, and has forfeited any claim to the healthcare we more deserving people can expect.

The list of illnesses which are officially preventable now includes coronary artery disease, heart failure, kidney failure, diabetes, stroke and many kinds of cancer. And just a week or two ago, Alzheimer’s disease was added to the list.

It is possible that in a decade or so, if you acquire an illness from this growing list of “preventable” medical disorders – especially if your annual wellness checks reveal that you have gained weight since college, or you habitually fail to exercise at least 90 minutes per day, or that you imbibe less than one or greater than two alcoholic beverages per day – you may be triaged to Tier B healthcare. Tier A will be reserved for people who obviously care more than you do about wellness, and about their duty to society. Just as obesity does today, the state of your health will demonstrate your true commitment to the perfect society to which we all aspire.

For, when it is your duty to maintain wellness, your illness reveals a grave dereliction.

In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it would no longer pay for the treatment of “never events,” i.e., certain medical conditions in hospitalized patients which the Feds deem to be universally avoidable under all circumstances. These conditions included:

* Decubitus ulcers
* Two kinds of catheter-associated infections
* Air embolism
* Mediastinitis after coronary bypass surgery
* Transfusing patients with the wrong blood type
* Leaving objects inside surgery patients
* In-hospital falls

Then, having been delighted with the results of its original list (or dismayed that healthcare costs continued to skyrocket despite its original list) CMS subsequently proposed declaring several new conditions as “never events,” including:

* Surgical site infections following certain elective procedures
* Legionnaires’ disease
* Extreme blood sugar derangement
* A collapse of the lung resulting from medical treatment
* Delirium
* Ventilator-associated pneumonia
* Deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism
* Staph infection in the bloodstream
* Disease associated with Clostridium difficile infection

Numerous commentators have expounded on the advisability of declaring these particular conditions to be “never events.” All agree that while certain of them clearly should never be permitted to happen (e.g., leaving sundry tools inside a patient’s abdomen, or transfusing the wrong blood), certain other ones are going to continue happening to some patients no matter how high the quality of the institution and the medical professionals.

Because this topic has been so well-covered in the medical blogosphere, DrRich does not need to comment any further on the unfairness of insisting that doctors prevent every single instance of conditions that are often not particularly preventable; or on the fact that insurance companies quickly followed Medicare’s lead and now also refuse to pay for these “never events;” or that hungry attorneys have voraciously begun suing doctors and hospitals for unavoidable complications because those complications have been federally designated as avoidable; or even the fact that, having so deftly expanded the horizons of what can be considered a “never event,” the feds have cleared the path for defining virtually any medical condition they choose as a “never event.”

(As a case in point, DrRich notes that the feds’ own guidelines on preventing delirium, referred to in their own “fact sheet” that purports to justify the expanded list of “never events” admits that there are no effective means of reliably preventing delirium.)

There’s also no point in physicians complaining publicly about this expanded list of “never events,” since the public is foursquare behind the notion that no medical complications should ever occur, and if they do occur it is somebody’s fault, and equally behind the notion that the Feds can squeeze quality into the system simply by demanding it to be so. Therefore, any doctors who openly objects to these new, tough quality measures will reveal themselves to be both anti-quality and low-quality doctors.

Rather, DrRich will refer back to the true mission of this blog, and simply explain to his readers how this new “never event” strategy furthers the true mission of Medicare and the insurers, which is to say, the covert rationing of healthcare.

For covert rationing is the chief operating principle of both the Feds and the private insurers. Indeed, their behavior resembles nothing more than the behavior of the closet, white-collar narcotic addict: while smiling their pasty smiles and desperately pretending to us that all of their new initiatives are only concerned with quality and nothing else, in reality, with every ounce of their being, their devious minds are constantly inventing new schemes to manipulate, deceive and twist each and every opportunity into some means of scoring their next covert-rationing “hit.”

Consequently, we cannot go wrong if we ask, every time we see some new healthcare program ostensibly aimed at quality improvement: Where’s the rationing?

One might think the rationing in this case is easy to spot. After all, if the feds stop paying for “never events” that actually cannot be avoided, they will save dollars right up front simply by refusing to pay for services rendered. But Medicare itself has estimated that its up-front annual savings from its original list of “never events” will be only about $20 million. And that seems hardly worth the effort.

The real savings will come from a place far more sinister than that.

The “never events” initiative – just as the Feds insist to us – is aimed at changing physicians’ behavior. But quite predictably, that behavioral change will not be in the arena of quality improvement (since no amount of quality improvement can stop “never events” that are inevitable). Rather, the behavioral change will be in the arena of risk avoidance.

While it is unlikely that doctors will ever refuse to care for high-risk patients who are experiencing genuine medical emergencies, it is quite likely they will stop recommending elective medical therapy for high-risk patients. Patients who seem particularly prone to infection, bed sores, falls, blood sugar abnormalities, blood clots, delirium, or who seem likely to need intravenous antibiotics (which predispose to C. difficile) will be particularly targeted. Roughly speaking, these patients will include diabetics, the elderly, anyone with a clotting abnormality or a history of blood clots, the obese, people with immune disorders, and the chronically ill. Physicians know by experience and instinct the sorts of patients to whom they ought to avoid offering elective medical services.

But in an era of evidence-based medicine, it is inevitable that savvy doctors will not want to rely on instinct and experience in this important matter. In order to conduct their risk avoidance in the most cost-effective way, they will want to base it on firm statistical evidence.

Accordingly, it is notable that investigators reporting in the Archives of Surgery last year began the important work of providing the kind of evidence-based risk avoidance which today’s physician actually needs. They published a large study designed to show which sorts of patients are most likely to experience post-operative “never events.” To the authors’ credit, their article was not written with the overt goal of providing a roadmap for risk avoidance. Instead it was written to show that “never events” are not really “never events” at all, but rather, are sometimes unavoidable complications; and that in certain readily-identifiable and (and obvious) subpopulations of patients, the incidence of “never events” is particularly high. That is, the authors were trying to convince the Central Authority that its policy on “never events” is far too Draconian, and that some leeway ought to be made for doctors who care for these higher-risk patients.

But of course the Central Authority already knows this, and also knows that the public fully supports its “never events” policy just as it is. The Central Authority, DrRich suspects, will see the Archives article for what it will end up becoming – a roadmap for surgeons who want to avoid the risk of encountering career-threatening “never events.” DrRich thinks Central Authority is quite satisfied with this study, and hopes to see more like it.

Conducting a risk/benefit analysis is nothing new to doctors. Doctors have always computed a risk/benefit analysis before recommending elective services to their patients (such as hip replacement, coronary artery bypass grafting, back surgery, gall bladder surgery, anti-obesity surgery, &c.) And in making those risk/benefit estimates, they have always taken into account the increased risk of complications faced by the elderly, the sick, the fat, and the malnourished.

But now, the “risk” part of the risk/benefit analysis suddenly must include three important new risks, and this time they are risks to the doctor him/herself, and not to the patients: 1) If any of these complications occur, no payment will be made for the (often very expensive) treatment the complication will require; 2) If a complication occurs, another “never event” will be tabulated in the federal database next to the doctor’s (and the hospital’s) name, which will inevitably show up in a public report card; and 3) Such a complication, previously considered a predictable risk, will now engender malpractice suits, based on the declaration by the Feds that these “never events” always constitute, by definition, grievous examples of poor-quality medicine.  The Archives article serves to place this new variety of risk analysis on firmer ground, and as such is an important new addition to the medical literature.

Lest anyone think that doctors would not really stop recommending clinically indicated care to patients just because of the personal risk it would entail, remember that it’s already happened, and is well documented. The government and the insurance companies have already conducted that experiment; it’s been completed, the results have been tabulated, reported, and duly noted. It turns out that doctors, like most other people, respond quite logically to negative incentives.

CMS knows exactly what it’s doing here.

Two years ago, for instance, DrRich was “invited” to testify as a witness before a federal grand jury in a matter involving one of his consulting clients. While under oath, DrRich was caused to understand that the Feds (at least certain members of the DOJ) are well aware of this blog, and of the general tenor of its content. The impression left by this experience makes DrRich doubt whether many of his fans come from that particular precinct.

Further, the CRB has been the victim of two targeted denial-of-service attacks just in the last several months. Perhaps this is a common experience for healthcare bloggers, but then again, perhaps not. Finally, there’s the fact that last May (some readers may recall) a nasty hacking exploit completely trashed the CRB at the server level, resulting in the loss of the first three years of DrRich’s endeavors here (which, some have said, is the greatest tragedy to befall posterity since the burning of the Library at Alexandria).

And so, Dear Reader, while DrRich is certainly happy to be hosting Grand Rounds for the fourth time, and is particularly delighted with the quality of postings which he has the honor of featuring this week, it occurs to him that hosting an event with such high (and well-deserved) visibility might draw certain “extra attention” here.  So perhaps you had better read this quickly.

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We begin with HealthAGEnda, the John A. Hartford Foundation blog, which is posting a remarkable series of articles by Amy Berman, a senior program officer at that foundation, who has recently been diagnosed with an incurable form of breast cancer. Ms. Berman discusses very openly and frankly both the good and the bad aspects of the American healthcare system she is encountering  as she deals with this likely fatal illness. In this post, the second in a series, Ms. Berman talks about her ordeal in confirming what she already strongly suspected was a very bad diagnosis, and describes the comfort she experienced, while “meeting the enemy,” from compassionate but frank healthcare professionals. She had a much less favorable experience, which she describes in her first post, demonstrating just how devastating it can be for a patient to encounter a one-size-fits all physician. The impact such an encounter has on a patient who needs real medical help is especially relevant in an era in which doctors are being urged (coerced) into following just such an approach. Ms. Berman is an extremely brave and gracious woman, and the important insights she is providing in her efforts to chronicle her illness ought to be read by every health professional.

Henry Stern of Insureblog discusses the documented, systematic mistreatment of the elderly under the British National Health Service. Stern points out that while similar mistreatment of the elderly also happens in the American healthcare system, here it is sometimes not systematic, but rather is most often due to sloppiness or inadvertent error, and further, when it happens remedial actions (such as lawsuits) are often available. In contrast (evidence suggests), treating the elderly badly in the NHS seems to have become virtual policy. DrRich, of course, longtime president and sole member of Future Old Farts of America (FOFA), is confident that nothing of the sort will ever happen here in the U.S. where the government always has our best interests in mind, and he is sure that when government officials refer to the NHS as an ideal to which we should all aspire, they are probably not talking about this part of it.

Writing on a related topic, Julie Rosen of Bedside Manner tells about steps doctors and families can take to resolve disagreements on how aggressive one ought to be when deciding on the use of certain treatments for elderly and mentally incapacitated patients. DrRich finds Ms. Rosen’s recommendations appropriate, since all of them take place at the local level, with full participation of the patient’s loved ones, and do not (explicitly, at least) involve the heavy hand of any Central Authority.

And still speaking of the role of authority in deciding on aggressive treatments, The ACP Internist posts a news report about a court-ordered spinal operation on a 16-year old who was injured during a wrestling competition. Neither the young man nor his parents wanted the operation, which they feared might cause paralysis.  (Apparently, they were actually paying attention during the “informed consent” process.) Further, as the mother apparently demonstrated in a video shown on local TV, her son had a “full range of motion” prior to surgery. Nonetheless, the young man was removed to protective custody, and the court-ordered surgery was performed (apparently successfully, thank goodness, or else this might have turned into a controversial decision). One hopes the judge, in making his determination that the family was not acting reasonably, was not swayed by their expressed partiality to herbal medicine and homeopathy. Wacko as such practices may be, they do not appear particularly relevant in this case, given the family’s seemingly cogent argument that the risk/benefit calculation, as it had been presented to them by medical professionals, simply did not meet their threshold for such aggressive treatment. Apparently, it met the state’s.

The ACP Hospitalist offers a post from a doctor at Grady Hospital entitled: “10 ways to know that the nurses hate you.” These 10 clues as to nurses’ disapprobation are both amusing and true. However, after observing for over 30 years the kinds of behaviors to which nurses are forced to resort when they see that things are greatly amiss, but at the same time they are powerless to directly intervene, DrRich thinks this post more accurately ought to be entitled, “10 ways to know that the nurses think you are killing your patients.” The nurses may or may not actually hate the doctor for it, but they wish he/she would stop – and here are 10 ways in which they may often express that wish.

While some states are big troublemakers (and you know who you are), others are moving to implement provisions of Obamacare just as the Central Authority has decreed. Louise from Colorado Health Insurance Insider tells us that Colorado Senate Bill 168 was introduced last week to create the nonprofit healthcare cooperative which is required by all states under Obamacare. (Shouldn’t somebody tell the Colorado state senators that writing long tracts like this in ALL CAPS is considered impolite, as it is the documentary equivalent of shouting?) Louise notes that the healthcare cooperatives mandated by Obamacare may help to reduce the number of uninsured, but adds that Obamacare “will do little to address a range of other problems, including rising healthcare costs, the unaffordability of healthcare even for people who have health insurance, over-utilization of care, and the problems created when we link health insurance to employment.” While these are all legitimate points, regular readers will know how little DrRich himself goes in for such grousing.

Obamacare, after all, does so much! As a case in point, David Harlow at HealthBlawg writes about Accountable Care Organizations, a new entity which figures prominently under Obamacare, and which will be a chief vehicle for controlling the cost and quality of healthcare (i.e., for controlling physicians’ behavior). A lot of scary things have been written about ACOs (including, truth to tell, things written here at the CRB), but Harlow points out that ACOs might not turn out to be such a bad idea after all. For evidence, he points to some of the successes realized by AQCs (Alternative Quality Contracts) in Massachusetts, under admittedly favorable practice environments, and notes that some of these successes might be translated directly to ACOs. DrRich hopes he is right. But it is a little worrisome that nobody, including Harlow (as he himself allows), really knows what ACOs will end up looking like. Their structure is, as we speak, being fought over by numerous federal agencies (like a carcass being fought over by a pack of dogs), and among these agencies (DrRich shudders to contemplate) is the Department of Justice. But Mr. Harlow knows far more about this stuff than DrRich, so let’s all hope for the best. Short of defanging Obamacare, that’s about all one can do.

Amy Tenderich of Diabetes Mine submits a guest post from Valentine’s Day, written by Wendy Strgar, entitled “Healthy Sex, Healthy Love.” Ms. Strgar, who is known in some circles (circles of which DrRich himself is innocent) as a “loveologist,” and who markets the sexual-aid products to prove it, actually makes a pretty convincing argument that sexual activity can be an important part of reducing one’s risk for all sorts of medical problems. So: Are you one of those folks who has thought about having more sex, but you’re just not sure the pay-off is worth all the trouble? Read this post.

Dr. Pullen at DrPullen.com posts about the problem of anti-personnel mines, which continue killing and maiming innocent people all over the world, and for decades after hostilities cease. He rightly thinks the US ought to do more to resolve this problem, and in particular, he decries apparently serious suggestions some have made that we ought to deploy mines on our southern border to prevent illegal crossings. DrRich agrees with Dr. Pullen, but does not believe that mining the U.S. border will ever become a serious consideration (unless it is to prevent American citizens from sneaking southward to receive black market healthcare).

Doug Perednia at The Road to Hellth is writing a fascinating series on the wonders of Pay for Performance. In this, his second offering, Perednia provides some pretty overwhelming evidence, including evidence from studies which proponents use to justify P4P, that P4P demonstrably does nothing useful. Actually, DrRich should qualify that statement: It does nothing useful in terms of improving clinical outcomes. What it does do (as Perednia demonstrates) is to forcibly distract physicians from listening to their patients, to fully consume all the time allotted for a patient visit, and to actively discourage other forms of doctor-patient interactions which might lead to additional healthcare expenditures. So despite a now-well-documented lack of any improvement in patient outcomes, P4P is in fact achieving its actual designed ends, and thus must be counted a great success.

Dr. Joe Smith, who writes the Dr. Unplugged blog (a Medscape blog which requires free registration), travels the globe seeking out emerging technologies related to wireless healthcare. In his latest article Smith laments the fact that, so far, the healthcare consumer has completely missed out on the ongoing wireless revolution, a revolution that has greatly empowered consumers in virtually every other economic sphere. He concludes that despite this slow penetration, wireless technology inevitably will also transform the lives of healthcare consumers. DrRich agrees that this outcome is indeed inevitable, but thinks it may take a while. Resistance to the empowerment of individual healthcare consumers is deeply entrenched, massively well-funded, extraordinarily powerful, amazingly ruthless, and very widely distributed (from the beltway to the bedside). Such resistance is akin to the all-pervasive power of the Church 500 years ago, a power that was eventually broken, but that required the technology (printing press), the killer app (Bibles printed in the vernacular), the catalyst (Martin Luther’s 95 theses), the poorly-expressed but ultimately deep-seated desire of the populace for the knowledge being offered, and the fortitude to persevere through 300 years of reformational bloodshed. So, yes, history ultimately will win out with regard to wireless healthcare, but one fears it may take more than just the healthcare equivalent of the iPod or Facebook to see it happen.

The anonymous author of The Notwithstanding Blog is a Canadian medical student with a background in economics. In the short time this blog has been around, he (or she) has done some very cogent writing applying economic insights to medicine. The featured post describes why medical ethicists (despite their constant yammering about honoring the autonomy of the individual) almost always decide specific ethical questions the other way, that is, against individual autonomy. DrRich, in his ham-fisted style of analysis, always tends to blame this phenomenon on the fact that Progressives in recent decades have largely taken over the Ethicists’ house, just as they have taken over in most academic fields, and that Progressives as part of their DNA must always come down on the side of the collective. But Dr. Notwithstanding offers what is likely a better explanation, based on economics (the science of human behavior) instead of on political ideology. As you’ll see, in addition to being an original thinker Dr. N is an engaging writer. You should give this blog a try.

In stark contrast to Notwithstanding’s anonymous blog is Carolyn Roy-Bornstein‘s eponymous one. Here she describes one of the absurdities doctors see every day with the modern-day electronic medical records which are being adopted all over the place, with great fanfare (and with public subsidies), to streamline healthcare, reduce redundancy, eliminate waste, and assure quality care. Namely, while these new electronic records may greatly simplify the lives of the federal regulators and the forensic accountants who keep track of which doctors are being naughty and which are being nice, they often gum up the works for the people on the ground who are actually trying to take care of sick people. EMRs can do this in many ways, and Dr. R-B nicely describes one of them: She laments the reams of redundant, boilerplate, tree-killing verbiage these records spit out, each and every day, for each and every patient, a characteristic which makes the formerly simple task of figuring out how the patient’s doing today a constant challenge, a perpetual exercise in patience and persistence. and a powerful attractor for medical errors. She ends by speculating whether it might make things easier to have somebody sing these records to her. A nice thought, but DrRich thinks it would not help. What you’d get is an early Phillip Glass composition, in which the same nonsense phrases are repeated over, and over, and over, and over. . .

The Happy Hospitalist discovers that latex examination gloves (powdered, one-size-fits-all, Spic and Span brand), are available at 10 for one dollar at the local dollar store. His discovery suggests a couple of things. As Happy points out, hospitals which are expected to survive on Medicaid payments now have someplace to shop. And, if you want to bring down the cost of healthcare products and services, simply make them available for direct purchase by consumers.

Carolyn Thomas of Heart Sisters writes of journalist Melissa Mia Hall who died in her Texas home in January after avoiding medical help for her severe and persistent chest pain (regarding which she wrote a running commentary to friends – and ultimately to posterity – via e-mail). Ms. Thomas concludes that had Ms. Hall had health insurance (which she did not), she likely would have done more than just document the progression of her fatal heart attack. DrRich has no personal knowledge of Ms. Hall, and so cannot contradict this conclusion, nor does he wish to. However, a recent survey by the American Heart Association showed that in 2009, only 50% of women (regardless of insurance status) said they would call 911 if they thought they might be having a heart attack. DrRich, who has long lamented the feminization of men in our society, now utters his dismay at the converse – the masculinization of women. Ladies, if you have symptoms suggestive of a heart attack, don’t try to tough it out. Call 911.

Steven Wilkins of The Mind Gap tells how sessions of culturally-sensitive “storytelling” can break down certain cognitive barriers for some patients, and more fully engage them in their medical treatment. Wisely, Wilkins is not suggesting that beleaguered PCPs develop a stable of appropriate yarns they can spin for their recalcitrant patients during the 7.5 minutes the Central Authority has allotted for each “patient encounter.” Rather, he has several helpful suggestions for incorporating such storytelling into existing systems, which would leave the doctors alone to do what they’re paid for – making little electronic chits on Pay for Performance checklists.

Vineet Arora at FutureDocs talks about the universally-recognized phenomenon of the over-ordering of radiological diagnostic tests, which is detrimental both to patients’ health and to the healthcare budget. She discusses the many reasons too many of these tests are ordered. It boils down to the fact that the healthcare system provides physicians with extraordinarily strong incentives, at many levels, NOT to rely on their clinical judgment, but instead, in order to optimize their odds of professional survival, to just go ahead and get the test. Unfortunately the solutions Dr. Arora suggests to this difficult problem do not hinge on restoring the doctor’s clinical judgment as a legitimate decision-making tool. (This is no fault of hers; to restore respect for the doctor’s clinical judgment would require a wholesale change in how the healthcare system now operates.)  Instead, she suggests counterbalancing the strong coercions doctors feel to order too many of these tests, with new, and equally strong, coercions not to. Laboratory rats faced with similar, unresolvable imperatives to respond to two opposite stimuli, of course, quickly die of the stress.

Dinah from Shrink Rap notes that the FDA is about to take an action that may effectively render electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) a thing of the past. Specifically, the FDA is likely to reclassify ECT machines (which have been in clinical use since long before the FDA controlled such things) as Class II medical devices. If so, then for these devices to remain on the market, the two companies that manufacture them would have to conduct expensive new clinical trials to document safety and efficacy within 30 months. Observers judge that these companies would not have the resources to do so. ECT is a highly controversial procedure, and there are vocal groups which are trying to ban it – but for some patients with severe depression, Dinah points out, ECT has been a very effective and potentially life-saving last resort therapy. These unfortunate patients, apparently, can now join all the others whose response to various treatments resides in the tail of the standard distribution curve, and for whom the tailored, individualized therapy they require will no longer be an option.  So they will just have to make do with the guideline-driven treatments that suit the average patient just fine. Nonetheless DrRich predicts this change can be implemented with minimal outcry, since severe depressives, being often imbued with great inanition, likely won’t complain very vociferously about it.

Speaking of shrinks, Philip Hickey of the Behaviorism and Mental Health Blog writes about his observations regarding how and why “mental illness” has become such a growth industry. He says, “’Mental illness’ is a spurious explanatory concept whose purpose is to medicalize for profit the ordinary problems of human existence which our ancestors tackled and resolved without drugs for thousands of years.” While DrRich might not buy his entire thesis, there is much more truth in what Hickey says than one would like to think.  Among other things, when healthcare becomes a right, then the more struggles of the normal human experience we decide to turn into a medical diagnosis, the more it becomes society’s obligation to alleviate those normal struggles. There is a natural endpoint to this process of over-medicalization, of course, but it is not pleasant to contemplate.

Dr. Wes speculates on what is really different about the new pacemaker leads which recently have been declared officially MRI-safe by the FDA. Wes suggests that much of the extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming effort that was made in obtaining the “MRI-safe” label had more to do with the incredible regulatory maze that had to be navigated, than with any actual engineering changes. DrRich, who a few years ago was peripherally involved as a consultant in a similar effort (with a different company), declares Dr.Wes’ speculation to be likely pretty accurate. But fear not, for Medicare will be reimbursing the manufacturer for its regulatory ordeal for many years to come.

The venerable DB of DB’s Medical Rants offers a timely rant about how those who create the clinical guidelines which dictate the practice of modern medicine often do so inadvisedly, and sometimes with their own (possibly cryptic) agenda in mind, and as a result of such guidelines, patients may die. DrRich himself has covered this same topic lately. DB’s commentary hits the mark.

Paul S. Auerbach of the Medicine for the Outdoors Blog provides this post on cholera vaccines. It turns out that cholera vaccination is a little less than straightforward, and given the relatively small amount of vaccine available worldwide, would not be suitable for wide-scale use. So as far as cholera prevention goes, pray for sanitation.

Rich Elmore and Paul Tuten at HealthcareTechnologyNews write the wonderful news that the Direct Project has launched. The Direct Project, they tell us, is an implementation of a secure, health-related e-mail standard designed to “allow health practitioners to securely exchange health data, medical records digitized to be easily shared between doctor’s offices, hospitals, benefit providers, government agencies and other health organizations, all across America.” This sounds like a pretty good idea, except perhaps for the “government agencies” part, since, for many of us, these are the very folks we’d least want looking at our most private personal information. As for the patients themselves, it is not clear whether they also will have ready access to all this extremely secure information about their own health, or whether instead they will have to wait until the information finally shows up on Wikileaks.

February 24 – DrRich has been petitioned by the authors to issue a correction for this last item. In order to do complete justice to them, DrRich reproduces their suggested correction in its entirety:

“The Direct Project encrypts the information being transmitted.  No one other than the intended received can get the information.  There is nothing stored using the Direct Project technologies – it serves only as a transport mechanism to enable, for example, a provider to securely send information to a consulting physician.  The goal is to replace the pervasive fax machine with something more secure, more modern and able to be used by healthcare stakeholders with the most basic technology (internet access and a PC) up to the most sophisticated user of an electronic health record.”

DrRich thanks the authors for correcting any misapprehensions he may have inadvertently introduced.  To be clear, when the Feds get your personal health information, and when you have difficulty obtaining it yourself, that will not be the fault of Direct Project, whose purpose is merely to assure that the data gets sent only to the person/agency which is targeted to receive it, and no one else.  DrRich leaves it as an exercise for his readers to determine whether his original commentary may still offer any value.

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Thanks for speed-reading Medical Grand Rounds this week.

Next week Grand Rounds will be hosted by The Examining Room of Dr. Charles.

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Two weeks ago DrRich wrote about the abuse of implantable defibrillator guidelines, as illustrated by a recent JAMA article claiming that over 22% of ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) implantations are “non-evidence based.” The abuse of the guidelines, DrRich showed, was perpetrated less by ICD implanters, and more by the authors of that article. That fact being interesting but irrelevant, DrRich went on to speculate that perhaps the Feds would rouse themselves to take this issue to the next level.

It certainly did not take long. Indeed, just a days after DrRich’s post (which ought to completely absolve him of having any direct impact on the Feds’ action), it was revealed that the Department of Justice had already launched an investigation of ICD implants, as related to “proper guidelines for clinical decision making.”

This revelation was made on the website of the Heart Rhythm Society, the professional organization of electrophysiologists (EPs). HRS went on to say that it (HRS itself) had “agreed” to assist the DOJ in an advisory role in its investigation. Furthermore: “Because this is an ongoing investigation, HRS Staff or Leadership is not available for further comment. HRS will communicate additional information to its membership when permitted to do so by the DOJ.” (Emphasis DrRich’s.)

So here’s what we know:

1) The DOJ is actively investigating ICD implantations.
2) Their investigation has to do with the “proper use of guidelines” in selecting patients for ICDs.
3) HRS, the professional organization to which EPs pay huge dues each year in order that it might represent their interests, most especially their interests in Washington, has been preemptively co-opted by the Feds, and indeed has been gagged, so that any further communication to its own membership regarding the investigation is forbidden until further notice.

What will HRS tell the DOJ? It hardly matters, since the important thing has already been accomplished, i.e., effectively silencing the sole organization which represents the interests of EPs in Washington. But, while the HRS statement indicates that the organization is “assisting” the DOJ with “information that does not include either identifiable patient or facility level data,” and while DrRich has no doubt that this is the sincere intent of HRS, DrRich also believes it to be a sure thing that, at the end of the day, HRS (if it wishes immunity from any liability it might find itself subject to, regarding the advice, statements, educational materials, &c., it might have produced over the years, relating to clinical guidelines, or to any other matter of interest that might surface during the DOJ’s open-ended investigation), will tell the DOJ Anything It Wants To Know.

DrRich’s fellow bloggers who are also electrophysiolgists, Wes Fisher and John Mandrola, quickly noted the HRS statement on their respective blogs, and each expressed a certain amount of concern as to the implications of the DOJ’s investigation. But Larry Husten, who writes the excellent Cardiobrief blog, offers a calming voice: “I doubt that the DOJ is gearing up to tackle the vast majority of “reasonable” off-guideline implants. I think they will be going for the real outliers, and when and if they reveal the details of their case there will be little sympathy for their targets.”

Some of DrRich’s readers, who not inappropriately consider him to be a bit paranoid about the Central Authority, may find it surprising that, fundamentally, he agrees with Larry on this matter. He does not think the DOJ will round up large numbers (or even moderate numbers) of EPs who have been practicing basically sound electrophysiology, and who likely have reasonable explanations for any off-guideline ICD implantations they may have committed. DrRich agrees that the DOJ instead will go after a few outliers, figures who – very specifically – will garner little sympathy amongst the public, and indeed, who can be held out, with good effect, for public castigation. Preferably, these figures will be individuals about whom the marketing departments of one ICD manufacturer or another will have generated a few embarrassingly glowing e-mails, celebrating the sheer number of sales these doctors have produced, and discussing strategies – offering speaking engagements in exotic locations, putting on pig roasts, &c. – to keep the ball rolling.

In other words, it is likely at the end of the day the DOJ will produce a few doctors who are truly abusing the system, and harming patients to boot, and who will actually deserve what they will get.

There is no guarantee about this, of course. DrRich has written about how he himself, in his pristine innocence, was once the target of a federal investigation of ICD implants. And while he had on his side the virtues of good medical practice, truth, justice, the American Way, ethics, and even the law, and while he eventually was extricated from his situation with an entirely clean record, it was a close thing, and his escape was based more on luck than on being right. More recently, when DrRich had the “opportunity” to testify under oath in a DOJ investigation on another matter (which he is not yet at liberty to discuss, but regarding which, happily, he was only a witness this time, and not a target), DrRich was required by the DOJ to answer several questions about this very blog and its content, which (as far as DrRich could tell) had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter at hand. By this means DrRich was led to know that the Feds are either among his very great fans (Hi, Fellas!) – or something else.

DrRich’s paranoia, you see, is hard-won, not to mention evidence-based.

So it is indeed possible for innocents to get drawn into such matters – collateral damage is always unavoidable when one is at war – but odds are it won’t be You, or You, or You, so like Larry says, not to worry. They are looking for true evil-doers.

DrRich also agrees with Larry that this DOJ investigation is not a direct response to the JAMA article. The JAMA article appeared a mere week or two before HRS made its announcement – and its announcement obviously was so carefully lawyered-up that it must have taken weeks if not months to negotiate just that one detail with the DOJ. This has all been in the works for a while.  But DrRich does not believe for a moment that the DOJ was unaware that the JAMA article was coming out, or that its content, and the subsequent media attention it would create regarding the widespread ICD abuses being perpetrated by EPs, would dovetail nicely with the subsequent revelation by HRS of the DOJ investigation.

ICDs, and their implanters, have long been a target of the payers – both government payers and insurers – and this new enterprise is merely the latest battle in a long war.

As it happens, DrRich spoke at a certain investigators’ meeting just this past weekend, which was attended by a score or so of prominent electrophysiologists. He can report that the JAMA article (which defined off-guideline ICD usage as bad medicine and harmful to patients), followed by the intense publicity in the media this article generated (also emphasizing bad medicine and harm to patients), followed by the DOJ investigation related to the “proper use of guidelines” in ICD implantation, followed by the co-opting and the gagging of the EPs’ own professional organization, is having a delightfully chilling effect on the profession. DrRich thinks it is unlikely that very many off-guideline ICD implants will be performed for the foreseeable future, no matter how much individual patients might benefit from them, at least while this investigation continues. In fact, while the investigation is ongoing, DrRich suspects that even referrals to EPs for ICD implants will drop off. Because, until then, it will remain an open question just how rigorously one must stick to the letter of the guidelines in order for the DOJ to give one a pass, and to not be considered as guilty of crimes against humanity. The profession is duly intimidated.

Whatever the final outcome of this investigation, it has has already had its intended effect.  DrRich respectfully suggests that the DOJ might just as well take its time with it, and let the effect percolate to perfection.

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Note: Further evidence came this afternoon (January 24) that the effect the Central Authority had in mind is being realized, when Wells Fargo Securities downgraded St. Jude Medical from Outperform to Market Perform. The downgrade was based on WFS’ assessment that ICD implants will be reduced by 10% in 2011, thanks to the DOJ investigation. That reduction doesn’t quite do it, of course, but it’s a start.

While DrRich is a conservative American, and has made plain the difficulties he has with the Progressive program in general and with Progressive healthcare reform in particular, at times he is forced to admit that, on occasion, the Progressive way of looking at the world has certain merits. And as DrRich contemplates a question that has been bothering him lately, a question that no doubt plagues many American physicians who (unlike DrRich) are still toiling away in the trenches, he finds that this is one such occasion.

That question is: Just who are the people writing all those clinical guidelines – the  “guidelines” physicians are now expected to follow in every particular in every case, on pain of massive fines, loss of career, and/or incarceration?

DrRich is quick to say that the act of creating clinical guidelines is not inherently evil, and indeed, back in the day when guidelines were merely guidelines (instead of edicts or directives that must be obeyed to the last letter), creating clinical guidelines was a rather noble thing to do.

But today, we have physicians clamoring to become GOD panelists (Government Operatives Deliberating). These aristocrats of medicine will render the rules by which their more inferior fellow physicians, the ones who have actual contact with patients, will live or die. Clearly positions of such authority will be very desirable, and so, as one might predict, they are being vigorously pursued. And we are seeing candidates audition for these panels with efforts ranging from amateurish to ruthless. It puts one in mind of the early-season contestants on “American Idol.”

We see them vociferously extolling, in every public venue they can find, the idea of “fly by wire” medicine, whereby every decision physicians make will be determined not at the bedside but by the best and the brightest experts, acting at a distance. The experts will distribute rules of action based on only the best scientific evidence (“best” being determined by those selfsame experts). The directives they hand down will be models of actionable simplicity,spelled out so unambiguously that even doctors born, raised, and trained in the Midwest or the South will be able to follow them.  (And if the doctors refuse to cooperate sufficiently, non-physician medical professionals will be able to do the job.) We see them writing scientific papers that spin the evidence in such a way as to generate conclusions which will be soothing to the Central Authority. We see them editing medical journals in order to make certain that the correct conclusions are published, and the incorrect ones are not. We see them taking control of professional organizations, and using their positions to promulgate changes in medical ethics that advance the Borg-ification of medicine, and to formally endorse Obamacare on behalf of American physicians who, for the most part, were against doing so.

These people have gained great prominence within our healthcare system, and practicing physicians will be dealing with them and the consequences of their actions for many years to come. While the natural impulse of us typical American doctors may be to simply marvel at the wonder of it all, shake our heads resignedly, and go about our increasingly distressing business, it may behoove us to take a closer look at these individuals, to attempt to understand them a little better. After all, their activities in the near future promise to greatly impact our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

So – who are they, anyway?

This, dear reader, is where the Progressive mode of thought comes in handy. DrRich refers, of course, to the Progressive doctrine of Diversity.

Diversity, for those who pretend not to know, is perhaps the chief mechanism by which Progressives attempt to control the behavior of the population.

Recall that the Progressive program is to create the perfect society. The Progressive elite know just how to do this, of course, but individuals within every population throughout human history have insisted upon acting in their own self-interest, which is counterproductive to the collective goal. In past efforts to perfect human societies, such individual recalcitrance has been dealt with by means of concentration camps and pogroms and the like. “Diversity,” we all should admit, is a much kinder and gentler approach to curing the problem of individualism.

Specifically, the doctrine of Diversity defines the range of permissible behaviors and thoughts for a given group of people within a society. The numerous celebrations of Diversity we see all around us invariably turn out to be strategies to reinforce those allowable ranges of thought and behavior. In this way, members of a particular group who begin behaving and thinking outside the allowable range can be quickly identified and dealt with, either through correction (which brings them back into the group), or through vilification (which marginalizes them). It is easy to become confused about this, since classically “diversity” means something other than “conformity.”  (As a general rule, if you want to know what Progressives are really up to, listen to what they say and then look to see if their deeds are actually working toward the opposite thing.  DrRich thinks that much of the time you will find that they are.)

In any case, while in general DrRich does not approve of Diversity as it is being practiced today, he finds that the concept might be useful in attempting to answer the question at hand.

Specifically, DrRich refers to his theory that physicians (like any humans) tend to end up in careers that best suit their underlying personalities and proclivities, and so physicians in a given specialty will tend to think and behave like other physicians within that specialty, and unlike physicians in other specialties. If this theory has any merit (and let us call it the Diversity Theory of Physicians), it will allow us to make some generalizations about the characteristics of individuals who have chosen specific kinds of medical careers. DrRich stresses that he is aiming to make generalizations only, and while those generalizations might help enlighten us to a modest degree regarding, say, what sort of physician will end up on the GOD panels, they can tell us nothing about particular individuals.

With that annoying disclaimer out of the way, let us examine some ways in which the DTP reveals Truth. An obvious example is the specialty of psychiatry, which tends to attract doctors who are, perhaps subliminally, concerned that they are just a little crazy themselves. As it happens, it often turns out they are correct. In DrRich’s experience, and in the experience of just about anyone who has encountered more than a handful of shrinks, these fine physicians, on average, display an astonishing degree of off-the-wall psychopathology. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Emergency room doctors have short attention spans and are afraid of commitment.

Endocrinologists get their jollies by sitting alone in cramped offices, parsing tremendous volumes of laboratory data from blood tests, which they claim reflect moment-to-moment variations in hormone levels, and from this arcane evidence are able to parse out (so they say) subtle glandular difficulties. If endocrinologists were not physicians they would be accountants; the more aggressive endocrinologists (who are identifiable by the dirty glance they give you if you happen to interrupt their lonely cogitations) might be forensic accountants. (How anybody could specialize in any organ that just sits there, perhaps secreting various invisible substances, but otherwise not doing anything whatsoever,  DrRich will never understand.)

Orthopedic surgeons are former jocks, or wish they were, and the ones who end up replacing hips in old ladies instead of patrolling the sidelines at college football games are often very frustrated individuals.

Party animals who manage to gain entrance to medical school often end up as anesthesiologists.

Cardiologists like to envision themselves (and would like others to envision them) as living on the edge. After all, they put catheters into damaged coronary arteries in patients on the brink of heart attacks, and, through their skillful manipulations, open those arteries and save lives. They are the extreme sportsmen of medicine, so they believe. But really, their jobs are ones of relative security, predictability and instant gratification. What they do in the cath lab actually is pretty rote, and it provides them with immediate, concrete results. They can even show the “before” and “after” pictures to the person they just saved, who will then heap praise and shed tears of gratitude upon them. But any time fixing a particular artery looks a little too risky, they call a cardiac surgeon right away. This pattern of behavior suggests to DrRich that their aggressive personnas and glory-seeking activities are actually masking an underlying insecurity.

It would not be fair of DrRich to psychoanalyze all these other specialists – who have done nothing to provoke him – without also doing the same for electrophysiologists. All electrophysiologists started out as cardiologists, of course, so they have that going for them. But to really understand electrophysiologists, one must invoke the principle of sublimation. To sublimate is to channel an underlying negative tendency to some activity that partially gratifies that tendency, but that is considered worthwhile by society. So, for instance, people with a tendency toward pyromania may become volunteer firefighters. People with sadistic tendencies may become prison guards. Foot fetishists can become shoe salesmen. Compulsive liars can become novelists.

Who, then, become electrophysiologists?

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when DrRich was practicing, what electrophysiologists mainly did was to try to prevent sudden death in patients who had a high risk of dying suddenly from cardiac arrhythmias. And in order to find the optimal therapy for these patients, it was necessary to induce, intentionally and repeatedly, cardiac arrests under controlled conditions. This was done in an effort to find an antiarrhythmic drug that would prevent the induction of cardiac arrest. This behavior we euphemistically called “serial drug testing.”  Fortunately, this procedure is no longer necessary, since the implantable defibrillator has been perfected and is now widely available for high-risk patients (if you can get it paid for).

While it has been widely remarked that those early-day electrophysiologists were a very strange group indeed, most of us who did this serial drug testing ended up successfully absorbed into normal society, and today (as far as DrRich can tell) we are for the most part generally pretty harmless. But DrRich sometimes finds himself wondering what might have become of some of us (some in particular more than others) if we had not had this remarkable opportunity to sublimate what one might speculate to be some rather unpleasant tendencies. And what is to become of that young person today who has whatever those unfortunate tendencies might be, and who, 30 years ago, might have found release as an electrophysiologist? One must not think too deeply about this.

Let us now turn our attention to those would-be GOD panelists, and see if we can decipher what kind of people these might be. Admitting that what follows – and, for that matter, what has just been said – amounts only to an educated guess, DrRich submits that the GOD panelists are people you already know well, if you have worked within the American healthcare system.

These are the kids you knew in college who studied all the time and got straight A’s in all the hardest courses, buttered up their teachers, then aced their MCATs. For them the hardest part about applying to medical school was in deciding which of the many schools that accepted them they should attend. Likely, they chose one of the Ivy League ones. Their first two years of medical school – the didactic years – were much like their college experiences. They studied hard, aced all the exams, and were generally acknowledged by both faculty and peers to be at the very top of their class.

Then they reached their clinical years, and things changed. They still knew more information than anyone else, and in fact their information base continued to expand. They read all the journals, and could always quote new research findings chapter and verse. They could conjugate the Krebs cycle on demand (or whatever it is you do with the Krebs cycle), and could recite precisely which enzyme that new drug inhibited, and could say why doing so made it OK to eat pizza again.

But what they could not do was be a good doctor. They had no instinct for it; no ability to get the patients to tell them the important information; no ability to read a patient’s facial expression, or phraseology, or body language, those signs that reveal the real truth. They had no ability to discern useful information from the flood of partial and contradictory clinical evidence that is always pouring in from several sources. When time was of the essence, they had no capacity to figure out what was going on or what they should do about it. They could not adjust to changing clinical situations on the fly. In an emergency they were paralyzed, trying to match the quickly evolving situation in front of them with the static words on the printed page. And often they were klutzes.

They were perfectly cut out to learn medicine, but lousy at actually doing it. What was worse, some of their colleagues who were mediocre in the book-learning department suddenly blossomed into highly competent clinicians on the wards, and quickly became recognized as rising stars by attending physicians, while they themselves were repeatedly chastised, or ignored.

And it just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t fair. They had worked harder than everyone else, had twice the brains as those others, and had learned the material three times as well. But the way God set it up, they just weren’t good doctors.

Many of these unfortunate souls quickly left clinical medicine, and branched off into research, academics, or administration. Most of them did quite well for themselves, because they really are very smart. But they never really got over their frustration and anger over their unjust  failures on the clinical wards, a place where their obvious inferiors lorded it over them. They have now spent years engaging in cognitive dissonance, convincing themselves that their apparent failure was an illusion, merely a sign of having been subjected to the anti-intellectual, shoot-from-the-hip, do-it-quickly-and-make-more-money environment that is American healthcare. After all, how could they be sub-optimal physicians when they are clearly far more intelligent and knowledgeable than the supposed “stars?” If the healthcare system had been arranged differently, in such a way as to make the cowboys behave the right way, they would have proven themselves to be the best clinicians in the land.  It is a bitter, bitter pill.

These are the guys, DrRich thinks, who are chomping at the bit for the opportunity to sit on the GOD panels. They would dearly love the chance to utilize their superior intellectual firepower, to distill the clinical research data, to digest it painstakingly and thoroughly (not haphazardly and on the fly like those others), to put down on paper the RIGHT way of practicing clinical medicine -  and to have the authority to do it in such a way (backed up by the full force of the Central Authority) that those lesser doctors will HAVE to do it their way, at long last.

The point of all this psychoanalytic guesswork is to suggest that the GOD panelists, even the GOD panelists who are physicians, will have no sympathy for the idea that the practice of medicine should be individualized to any degree whatsoever. The idea of individualizing medical care, rather than practicing by formula from a book, is what caused these people the most uncomfortable moments in their professional lives. Far from being sympathetic to the idea, they will probably be more hostile to it than the non-physicians on the GOD panels. When somebody on the panel suggests that, perhaps, we should give the doctor a little more leeway on this particular issue, these physicians will speak up and say, “Listen. I’ve been there and you haven’t. These doctors don’t need any more rope, unless it’s to bind them even tighter.” They were themselves shown no quarter, in the tough arena of clinical medicine where outcomes (and not process or book knowledge) is the only mark of success, and they will offer none in their turn.

DrRich cannot prove any of this, of course. He is just theorizing, based on his own personal observations and prejudices, having observed many of these whiz-kids in his 25 years of teaching medical trainees, and watching where they wound up. He could, of course, be wrong.

In any case, for allowing him to carry on in this manner DrRich owes one more expression of gratitude to his Progressive friends, whose doctrine of Diversity supplies the necessary substrate, and the ethical “cover,” for mercilessly stereotyping selected groups of what otherwise might turn out to be individuals.

Last week the newswires hummed with reports that doctors from all over America are grossly over-utilizing implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs), much to the detriment of patients themselves (whose persons are being physically violated by avaricious and/or ignorant physicians), and to the hard-pressed Medicare budget (ICDs being so incredibly expensive).

These reports were based on a study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which analyzed data from the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) in an attempt to determine the proportion of ICD implants in the US which constitute deviations from government guidelines. CNN put it like this: “Of more than 100,000 people who received ICDs, almost 23% did not need them according to evidence-based guidelines.” As the lead investigator of the JAMA study told CNN, “It’s a lot of people who are getting defibrillators who may not need them.”

Specifically the new study shows that a full 22.5% of patients receiving ICDs in the US from 2006 to 2009 received them outside of guidelines sanctioned by CMS. Furthermore, patients receiving “non-evidence-based” ICDs had a significantly higher rate of in-hospital mortality (0.57% vs 0.18%, p<.001), and of post-procedure complications ((3.23% vs 2.41%; p<0.001). Notably, ICDs implanted by non-electrophysiologists were significantly more likely to be non-evidence-based than ICDs implanted by electrophysiologists (24.8% vs. 20.8%).

The lead author stressed this latter point to theHeart.org: “Electrophysiologists — who do these procedures day in and day out and are more likely to be more familiar with the guidelines and the evidence that supports ICD use — were significantly less likely to use these non-evidence-based devices.” And an accompanying editorial in JAMA, also written by a couple of electrophysiologists, says that the results of this study indicate that the “intensive training” which electrophysiologists undergo “may improve both the preoperative evaluation of patients as well as the operative and immediate postoperative care of patients undergoing ICD implantation.”

So this study purports to tell us several things: A) Doctors who implant ICDs are surprisingly poor at following clear-cut, evidence-based guidelines; B) As a result, patients are receiving unnecessary medical devices, and suffering unnecessary harm; and C) At least one mitigation for this problem would be to make sure all ICD implantations are conducted by electrophysiologists. Further, ominously implied in some of the news stories regarding this study is the notion that, perhaps, so clear-cut an abuse ought to be looked into by federal prosecutors, similar to cases we have heard of lately involving the abuse of coronary artery stenting.

To all this, DrRich has a few observations:

1) Guidelines are No Longer Guidelines. “Guidelines” implies, literally, a guide, a signpost, a general set of factors that one ought to take into account when making specific decisions regarding specific individual patients. Guidelines are a strong set of recommendations which (all other things being equal) one ought to follow in the majority of cases, and when one chooses not to follow them, one ought to have a good reason for making that choice.

When the use of clinical guidelines is considered in view of this now-quaint notion, one does not expect 100% compliance. After all, patients being patients, they bring to the table lots and lots of special considerations one ought to take into account when deciding how to apply guidelines. Depending on the level of evidence upon which a certain set of guidelines were established, and considering the array of variations on the mean which patients still insist on bringing to a doctor’s notice, the optimal applicability of a given set of guidelines to a given population of patients ought to look something like a bell-shaped-curve. It is not immediately obvious, for instance, that a rate of compliance with a set of guidelines of 77.5% is simply too low. Indeed, a rate of compliance with your typical clinical guidelines well north of that number might imply, when one fully considers the matter, an abrogation of the physician’s duty to make informed clinical decisions based on ALL available evidence, including those introduced by an individual patient’s specific circumstances.

As a matter of fact, the very guidelines regarding ICDs which doctors are now accused of abusing admit that “the ultimate judgment regarding care of a particular patient must be made by the physician and the patient in light of all of the circumstances presented by that patient.”

In this light, a very striking feature of this new report is its baseline assertion that the strict following of guidelines is “evidence-based” practice, while any deviation is “non-evidence-based;” that is, by implication at least, it is good medicine vs. bad medicine. And so, “only” 77.5% of ICD implanters are practicing good medicine, and that is clearly a major concern – one for which urgent solutions should be sought.

It is one thing for the government to insist that doctors follow their guidelines to the letter, or face fines or worse; it is another for physicians themselves to internalize the same paradigm. Where does that leave patients who are relying on their doctors to use their clinical judgment for their own, individual benefit?

Anyway, guidelines are no longer guidelines; they are directives. Even the doctors agree with this.

2) Most of the Patients Who Received “Non-Evidence-Based ICDs” In This Study Actually Were Indicated For ICDs. News reports of this study, and public pronouncements from the authors themselves, imply that patients in this study who received ICDs outside of the guidelines were getting devices that were unnecessary; that their ICDs, which are deemed “non-evidence-based ICDs,” should never have been implanted. This is a misapprehension.

In the large majority of cases, the deviation from the guidelines was simply in the timing of ICD implantation. Patients received their indicated ICDs earlier than the guidelines specify. CMS guidelines say that patients who are indicated for ICDs should not receive them for 40 days after a heart attack, or three months after the diagnosis of heart failure. Most deviations occurred when patients who were supposed to get ICDs got them during the 40-day (or three-month) window.

So the doctors who violated the guidelines were deciding that, for one reason or another, their patients who needed ICDs would be better off receiving their potentially life-saving devices now rather than two or three months from now.

DrRich will leave aside for now the relatively weak evidence upon which CMS based its recommendation to delay ICD implantation following a heart attack or heart failure diagnosis, and simply assert that it is probably the least evidence-based portion of the ICD guidelines, and in fact, the language in the guideline’s supporting documentation, provided by CMS itself, admits to a certain amount of aribitrariness here. (Perhaps DrRich will discuss in detail in a future post the very “interesting” process CMS followed in establishing these ICD guidelines in the first place.)

But even if you buy the notion that the delay prescribed by the guidelines is fully legitimate, there are still many good reasons one might choose not to wait. Perhaps the patient also needs a pacemaker, and implanting a pacemaker now, and subsequently removing it and replacing it with an ICD (which also functions as a pacemaker) in less than 40 days makes little sense. Perhaps the patient will soon be losing her health insurance (not an uncommon situation these days). Perhaps there are features suggesting that the heart failure is particularly unlikely to improve during the next 3 months. Perhaps there are features that imply that a patient has a particularly high risk of sudden death in the near term.

Whatever. The point is that this study does not show that 22.5% of ICD implants are unnecessary. It shows that sometimes ICDs which everybody agrees are indicated are being implanted a few weeks earlier than the Central Authority would like. The NCDR database the authors used to determine guideline compliance did not allow them to assess the legitimacy of the doctors’ decisions to implant them earlier than CMS prescribes.

Back in the 1990s, when the enlightened idea of “medicine by guidelines” was first being promulgated, it was taken as a basic tenet that, after sufficient training and education had been accomplished regarding a set of guidelines, if deviations from the guidelines still exceeded expectations, then it is necessary to consider that there may be something amiss about the guidelines themselves, and the rationale behind the guidelines ought to be formally revisited. But that was back when guidelines were still guidelines, and not directives.

3) The Important Outcome Is Conspicuously Absent In This Study. One can surmise that the main reason doctors implanted ICDs earlier than the guidelines recommend, 22.5% of the time, is that they thought their patient might experience sudden death during the waiting period. That is, they wanted to protect their patient from sudden death now, instead of two or three months from now. Maybe they were just being obstinate, or stupid, but that was their rationale.

This being the case, the critical information we would want to know is whether the early implantation of ICDs might have led to an overall difference in survival. But alas, that critical information is also not available in the NCDR database. So we know (because the authors were quick to point out) that patients who received “non-evidence-based” ICDs had a worse in-hospital mortality (a difference of roughly 0.4%), and a worse post-procedure complication rate. But what was the difference in survival at, say, one year? Did the early implantation of ICDs increase overall mortality (which is the impression the authors and the newswires leave us with), or did it reduce overall mortality by offering extended protection from sudden death? An overall reduction in mortality was, after all, what the physicians intended when they selected a subset of patients they thought would benefit from not waiting for their ICDs. And it is entirely possible that their decisions did just that.

It seems to DrRich that we might want to know this information, before we castigate too severely (or submit for prosecution) the physicians who judged that “early” ICD implantation would be the best approach in a certain proportion of their ICD-indicated patients.

4) Electrophysiologists Can Be As Self-serving As Anyone Else. This last observation saddens DrRich, himself an exceedingly humble and self-effacing electrophysiologist, as his many thousands of great admirers will attest.

The authors of this study – and the editorialists who wrote in the same issue of JAMA – are all among DrRich’s brethren electrophysiologists. All of them seem to conclude from their analysis that ICDs ought to be implanted by electrophysiologists pretty much exclusively, since we EPs are demonstrated to be (thanks to this study) more likely to follow the guidelines, presumably because we are more “familiar with the guidelines and the evidence that supports ICD use,” by virtue of our “extensive training,” our vast experience, &c.

But once again, the majority of guideline “deviations” which were seen in this study were in the timing of ICD implantation, and not in the fact of ICD implantation. In effect, therefore, the authors are arguing that electrophysiologists are simply better at counting to 40 than those other kinds of doctors. DrRich does not find this a compelling argument for instigating an amendment to the guidelines aimed primarily at protecting the electrophysiologists’ turf.

Furthermore, DrRich suspects that the better compliance with the guidelines evidenced by electrophysiologists has less to do with their superior guideline-following prowess, and more with the fact that there tends to be a built-in delay when EPs implant ICDs. Patients with fresh heart attacks and recent heart failure diagnoses are under the care of non-electrophysiologists (many of whom can implant ICDs themselves, whenever they think they ought to), while patients seen by electrophysiologists generally have to first be referred – a process that introduces a fortuitous delay, and thus, of better guideline “compliance.”

Indeed, when one considers this built-in advantage enjoyed by EPs, one must wonder at the fact that, even for patients implanted by electrophysiologists, nearly 21% still received “non-evidence-based” (i.e., “early”) ICDs. This value, statistically-speaking, may indeed be significantly less than the overall value of 22.5%. But practically speaking it is pretty much the same rate of non-compliance. Which leaves one wondering: Why are electrophysiologists – who suggest that they alone ought to be doing these procedures – themselves so lousy at following the central directives?

Perhaps they, too, need remedial counting lessons. Or perhaps they, with their superior intellect and experience and so forth, actually agree with their non-EP colleagues that delaying ICD implantation in all patients with recent heart attacks and heart failure diagnoses may sometimes (roughly a fifth of the time) be counterproductive.

But no matter. Guidelines are guidelines, which is to say, they’re directives. Following them to the letter is good. “Interpreting” them is bad. It is now apparent that even sophisticated physicians, who should know better, have completely bought in to this new paradigm on guidelines favored by our Central Authorities, and appear less concerned about the implications of this paradigm on their patients and on the practice of medicine, than about how to turn it to their own, narrow advantage.

______

DrRich hates to be so darned prescient.  On January 19, it was revealed that the Department of Justice has launched an investigation regarding ICD implants, as related to “proper guidelines for clinical decision making.”  DrRich tells electrophysiologists, and other ICD implanters, what to make of this rather scary prospect, here.

From the ominously-titled book, “New Rules,” by Donald Berwick MD and Troyen Brennan MD:

“Today, this isolated relationship [between doctor and patient] is no longer tenable or possible. . . Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad, must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care. . . The primary function of regulation in health care…is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Berwick’s straightforward formulation of the appropriate role of the individual physician in our reformed healthcare system is not isolated to thinkers of the Progressive persuasion. The notion that most clinical decisions can be usefully made by a centralized authority is attractive even to some conservatives.

For example, a few years ago the noted economist Arnold Kling strongly defended the idea. “My own view is that a remote third party probably can use statistical evidence to make good recommendations for a course of treatment.”

Now, Kling is no far-left radical, pushing for centralized control of healthcare (and everything else). Indeed, he is now with the Cato Institute, and before that he taught economics at George Mason University. So he has earned his conservative and/or libertarian chops.

And to be fair, he is not really calling here for “remote third parties” to have final authority on what’s best for individual patients. Rather, he thinks patients should make that decision for themselves, weighing the recommendations of data-driven guidelines promulgated by remote experts, against the ego-toss’d recommendations from their all-too-fallible doctors, or, as Kling sarcastically refers to them, their “heroic personal saviors.” (Such sarcasm, regular readers will know, is as abhorrent to DrRich as it probably is to you.) Kling is saying: trust patients, armed with good evidence-based recommendations handed down from experts, to make the right decisions for themselves.

In concept even DrRich supports this latter notion. Indeed, a chief theme of this blog has been that doctors have been coerced into such a compromised position by the government and the insurance carriers that wise patients will no longer simply trust their doctors’ advice explicitly. As things now stand, patients who place full reliance on their doctors, assuming that they’ll get all the information they need to make good medical decisions, are putting themselves in peril. Smart patients will seek out all the information they can about their own medical conditions, so they can confirm that their doctors are indeed presenting them with all their reasonable options, and so they can more intelligently evaluate those options. And certainly, expert-endorsed guidelines would be an important part of that research.

But Kling’s remedy – that patients rely on the treatment recommendations made by expert panels as a remedy to the conflicted advice being doled out by their own doctors – is seriously flawed.

The first flaw, of course, is the idea that remote third parties, wielding evidence-based data, can make good treatment recommendations for individual patients. Evidence-based guidelines, almost by definition, are designed to improve the average outcome across a population of individuals, and are specifically designed not to optimize outcomes for each individual within that population.

Second, Kling apparently assumes that the remote third parties who are producing evidence-based treatment recommendations will be acting in a completely objective and unbiased manner. But this can never be the case. A major theme of the Covert Rationing Blog this past year has been to demonstrate that a) clinical science is probably the least exact of the sciences; b) the design and interpretation of clinical studies is inevitably attended by significant bias; and c) therefore, no matter who is producing them – whether it is medical professionals or GOD panelists (Government Operatives Deliberating) – these guidelines will always be produced with a particular agenda in mind. To assume that such agendas will be primarily – or even remotely – related to optimizing the outcomes of individual patients will often be a serious error.

Third, the idea that patients, even very intelligent patients armed with “perfect information,” can by themselves reliably sort through the morass of conflicting evidence and conflicting opinions that invariably inform any set of clinical recommendations (whether made by vaunted teams of completely objective experts from on-high, or by one’s inherently flawed, conflicted and ego-driven personal physician) is simply false. This would be the case even if the healthcare system were perfectly aligned to help patients. Which, of course, it is not. (It is aligned to affect the covert rationing of healthcare.)

Finally, while the advice patients get from their doctors is indeed biased, more and more it is biased (thanks to heavy-handed coercion) in favor of those same central authorities that are commissioning the expert panels.

As a result, patients – especially when they are sick and least able to fend for themselves – are generally incapable of negotiating the gratuitous complexities and hidden hazards laid out before them by a hostile healthcare system, a system which silently prays they will, in frustration, just go buy themselves some alternative medicine remedy, then crawl under a bush and die while contemplating their qi. Indeed, patients are as incapable of successfully navigating such a system as are accused felons of navigating a complex and hostile legal system that’s bent on sending them away for 15-20 years.

It is for this very reason that accused felons are assigned an advocate, an individual who is ethically and legally obligated to take their part, to help them navigate all the legal hazards, to do everything possible to see they are treated fairly, and that they are given every reasonable chance to prove their innocence. Lawyers, as much as we physicians might like to castigate them, are absolutely critical to a civil society.

And this is the reason why patients (according to traditional, though now quaint, medical ethics) are also supposed to have a personal advocate, an individual who is obligated to take their part, to help them navigate all the medical hazards, to do everything possible to see that they are treated fairly and that all available medical options are made open to them, and that they are given every reasonable chance of a good clinical outcome. Patients, in other words, need doctors who are devoted to the classic precepts of their profession. Such doctors, as much as Kling and others might like to diminish their importance, are also absolutely critical to a civil society.

But, as we have seen, and as has been publicly celebrated by Dr. Berwick and others, severing the classic doctor-patient relationship has been Job One under our system of covert rationing – whether that rationing is managed by insurance companies or by the government. Doctors simply cannot be allowed any longer to place their patients first. They’ve got to place the needs of their true masters first. They’ve got to keep the government and the insurers happy or they’re out of a job. They are no longer permitted to tailor clinical choices to best fit their individual patients, but they are simply to apply treatment directives as they are handed down by (from now on, government-appointed) panels of experts.

And this brings us back to Kling. DrRich of course agrees with his notion that patients ought to be armed with the high-quality information they need to determine their own medical destiny. DrRich can even agree that relying solely on the information provided by today’s doctor is generally not advisable. But DrRich cannot agree with the reason it’s not advisable. Doctors aren’t so much inherently flawed by ego and other intrinsic character flaws (at least, no more than any other group of humans), as they are operating under duress, under imposed constraints, and under external coercions that systematically and purposefully prevent them from discharging their professional obligations.

Nor can DrRich agree with Kling’s proposed solution. No centralized set of recommendations, evidence-based or not, can fix this problem for patients – especially when the expert bodies that make those recommendations are controlled by the same entities that have, with malice aforethought, killed the medical profession for the express purpose of stripping patients of their advocates, and therefore, of their medical options.

DrRich has trouble seeing a solution to this problem that is not radical. He does not see how doctors can resume their rightful place as their patients’ advocates and remain in what has become of the traditional healthcare system. Perhaps enough doctors to make a difference will leave the traditional healthcare system, shedding themselves of the third parties who now control their behavior, and re-establishing their practices (and revitalizing their profession) with a new commitment to the doctor-patient relationship. If not, then perhaps some brand new profession will establish itself (call it “personal healthcare advocates”) to fill the great void that threatens the safety of every American patient.

So yes, let individual patients weigh all the evidence and choose the healthcare option that suits them best. But unless they have a personal advocate to help them navigate the morass of biased choices – whether that advocate is their PCP like it’s supposed to be, or some new variety of professional advocate – those options will be limited to whatever healthcare is deemed best by the central planners.

A fine economist such as Dr. Kling should realize that a remote third party can no more make good recommendations for individual patients trying to survive in the rough and tumble of the healthcare system, than can a remote third party make good recommendations for individual businesses trying to compete in the rough and tumble of the marketplace. It is one thing for Progressives to hold to such a notion. It is far more disturbing to see respected conservative thinkers doing so.

In his last post, DrRich suggested that the Guideline Wars (i.e. the bloody battles over who gets to establish the patient-care guidelines that determine which patients will get which medical services, and which medical specialists will get to provide them) are about to enter the Obamacare phase, in which those who make the guidelines will no longer be medical professional organizations, but agents of the federal government. DrRich helpfully labeled the various guideline panels provided for by the Obamacare legislation as the “GOD panels” (for Government Operatives Deliberating), in order to avoid using the more inflammatory “death panels” terminology favored by certain less sophisticated commentators.

In addition, DrRich pointed out that his own tribe of medical specialists – the cardiologists – may perhaps be in a better position than most other physician tribes to manipulate the deliberations of these GOD panelists. The cardiologists would attempt such manipulations, DrRich suggested, by “pre-spinning” certain critical data from clinical trials, before that data is taken up by the government panels.

From their long experience in fighting the Guideline Wars, cardiologists understand that data from clinical science does not invariably lead to a fixed conclusion (as most proponents of evidence-based medicine seem to believe), but rather, can often be shaped into whatever sort of conclusion one might want to reach. Just as different primitive cultures discerned different constellations when they looked up into the same night sky, so will different groups of experts come to different conclusions when they look at the same clinical data.

Accordingly (DrRich submits), cardiologists have already embarked on the task of pre-spinning the data, such that when the GOD panelists look for the first time up into the vast and chaotic sky of clinical evidence, they will have in hand a map of the constellations as seen by the cardiologists.

To illustrate what he means, DrRich calls his readers’ attention to the SYNTAX trial, a clinical trial designed by cardiologists and their industry partners for the purpose of reaching a specific conclusion, but which (unfortunately for cardiologists) reached the opposite conclusion. If the data from the SYNTAX trial should ever fall into the hands of the GOD panelists (or any other guideline panels) in a pristine fashion, it could spell disaster. So the cardiologists have spent nearly two years attempting to make the data say what they want it to say, and today, after continuously massaging the data, issuing press release after press release, making presentation after presentation, and publishing academic paper after academic paper, it would be at least a little surprising if the God panelists, surveying this body of pre-spun data, would fail to produce clinical guidelines which provide the cardiologists at least some of what they’re after.

The SYNTAX trial randomized 1800 patients with complex coronary artery disease (i.e., CAD that produces either significant blockage in the left main coronary artery, or severe triple-vessel disease) to therapy with either bypass surgery or drug-eluting stents (DES), and assessed their long-term outcomes.

In general, patients with stable CAD (i.e., those who are not currently having a heart attack or unstable angina) do just as well with aggressive medical therapy as they do with invasive therapy. People like the ones enrolled in SYNTAX, however, are the exception to this rule. That is, patients with either of these two specific patterns of complex CAD have been shown to have improved survival if they receive bypass surgery. Indeed, these patients represent a virtual “last stand” for cardiac surgeons – they are nearly the only patients cardiologists (at least some cardiologists) still feel obligated to refer for bypass surgery. And, as one might expect, in their decades-long turf war with cardiac surgeons (a war from which they will not desist until they see the great majority of cardiac surgeons seeking jobs as beer vendors at sporting events), cardiologists have long chafed at this singular remaining obligation to refer.

Accordingly, SYNTAX, a study instigated by cardiologists and sponsored by Boston Scientific (a manufacturer of DES), was intended to show that with modern cardiac stents, stenting yields outcomes that are not significantly inferior to bypass surgery in these patients. Specifically, that is, SYNTAX was designed as a “non-inferiority trial.” This was certainly a modest goal – some might say too modest – but a positive result would enable cardiologists (the gatekeepers to all invasive CAD therapy) to simply keep these patients for themselves, just as they now do with all the other CAD patients. The SYNTAX trial asked the question, “Do I really have to refer these patients to the cardiac surgeon?” And the desired answer was, “No, it apparently is not statistically provable that you absolutely have to refer them, one supposes.” Judging from the study design, that answer would have been plenty rigorous enough for the study designers.

Alas, however, when the one-year follow-up data for the SYNTAX study was analyzed, the results turned out to be negative; stenting was significantly inferior to surgery. The endpoint of the study was a composite called MACCE (Major Adverse Cardiac and Cerebrovascular Events), and in this study included death, heart attack, stroke, and the need for more revascularization procedures. The bottom line is that in SYNTAX, the risk of MACCE was significantly higher for stenting than for bypass surgery. The study failed to meet even the modest non-inferiority goal the cardiologists had devised for it.

The one-year data for the SYNTAX trial was published in the spring of 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine, just as the battle over healthcare reform was taking shape, and nearly six months after Sarah Palin had reported her mysterious vision of death panels. But whether one wanted to call them death panels, GOD panels, or panels of distinguished monkeys, it was clear by the time SYNTAX was published that the government, and no longer the physicians’ own specialist organizations, would be manufacturing all clinical guidelines in the near future. So disaster loomed.

But, the cardiology community quickly rallied, and launched into a concerted effort to spin the results of SYNTAX from a disaster into a victory, or at least, to something akin to victory. And the efforts of the cardiologists in this regard have been impressive over the last 18 months.

Within minutes of the publication of the original SYNTAX article, scores of press releases were launched, and scores of “experts” were dispatched to give interviews, implying that the SYNTAX study was a major, ground-breaking victory for stenting.

For instance, here’s the link to an article in the New York Times (subsequently reproduced in hundreds of newspapers around the country) entitled, “Heart Stents Found As Effective As Bypass For Many Patients.”

And here’s a triumphant press release from Boston Scientific, the study’s sponsor, in which the negative overall results of SYNTAX are buried deep within the 6th paragraph (following all kinds of positive-sounding fluff), and are difficult to locate even if you are specifically looking for them.

And here’s the more-than-triumphant press release from one of the leading clinical sites for the SYNTAX trial, which reads, in part:

“At NorthShore, we experienced stunning outcomes [emphasis DrRich's] in patients whose only option would have previously been bypass surgery,” said Ted Feldman, M.D, F.S.C.A.I., Director of Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, NorthShore University HealthSystem, and a lead investigator of the trial. “The data in this study will provide cardiologists with additional information as they determine treatment therapy for patients with complex CAD.”

Most remarkable of all, we have the spectacle of the lead author of the SYNTAX paper, Dr Patrick W Serruys himself, telling Heartwire immediately after publication of the paper, that the paper’s concluding sentence (i.e., “CABG as compared with PCI is associated with a lower rate of MACCE at one year among patients with three-vessel or left main coronary artery disease (or both) and should therefore remain the standard of care for such patients.”), is just plain wrong. Serruys declared that this concluding sentence actually “is not the essence of the trial.” He only allowed that concluding sentence to appear in the paper, he said, “because the New England Journal of Medicine wanted something more conservative.” (Apparently, having the paper appear in a prestigious journal overrode the necessity of having the paper accurately reflect what the authors meant to say.)

In any case, Serruys insisted (despite the conclusion expressed in his ink-not-yet-dry paper) that many patients like the ones enrolled in the SYNTAX trial can safely be treated with stents, and indeed, he announced that he and his co-investigators were hard at work teasing apart the SYNTAX data in order to develop a so-called “SYNTAX score,” that would help cardiologists determine which patients they can treat themselves, without referring them for surgery. So indeed, despite the negative results, and despite the conclusion written in their own paper, the SYNTAX trial was immediately spun by key trial participants themselves into a win (while not a complete victory, still a win).

Before his readers come down too hard on the cardiologists for such behavior, DrRich feels obligated to point out a partially mitigating truth. Namely, cardiologists believe to the depths of their souls, notwithstanding the largely negative body of medical literature to the contrary, that stenting coronary artery blockages – in virtually any configuration and any clinical situation – saves lives. And if they haven’t been able to prove that yet, it’s just because of the vagaries of clinical research. One must not let spurious results from imperfect research block the Truth, lest one allow great harm to come to humanity.

The results of the SYNTAX trial must simply be wrong, cardiologists believe, and so they would be gravely harming patients if they did not take whatever steps were necessary to render the results of SYNTAX more favorable to stenting. To do otherwise would cause thousands of clinicians to make inappropriate decisions.

In this way, DrRich believes, cardiologists are no more guilty than are Progressives, another category of humans who believe with their hearts and souls in something that is simply not true (in the case of Progressives, that the great mass of humanity will willingly suppress their own individual interests in favor of the interests of the collective). Like the Progressives, cardiologists are often very nice, well-meaning, sensitive and compassionate individuals, and some of them would even be fun to go out with for a beer.

In other words, DrRich pleads, cardiologists are not being particularly evil in spinning the SYNTAX trial results; they are simply doing what comes naturally, and what they deeply believe to be the right thing.

This is why the SYNTAX investigators were convinced that, buried within the vast body of clinical data the SYNTAX trial has generated, there simply MUST be something useful to cardiologists. Accordingly, the SYNTAX investigators dived head-first into the proverbial room full of manure, enthusiastically digging for the pony which simply must be in there somewhere.

And indeed they quickly found their pony.

And here it is: While a straightforward analysis of the SYNTAX study shows that bypass surgery wins hands down over stenting, if one delves a bit deeper into the data, one finds that one of the components of the MACCE endpoint – the incidence of stroke – was statistically higher among the patients randomized to bypass surgery. One also finds that the incidence of needing revascularization during follow-up was higher in the stent patients. So, taking these two interesting observations together, the cardiologsts have concluded that patients receiving bypass surgery are trading a reduced need for subsequent revascularization for an increased risk of stroke – a bad trade indeed. Therefore, despite the overall results of the study, they have concluded that stents are better than bypass surgery for at least some patients. (And they promised to discover for us, during the data-mining exercise from which their “SYNTAX score” was subsequently invented, which patients those are.)

And this – the reduced incidence of stroke seen in the stent patients – is the basis for the celebratory statements which were issued by the SYNTAX investigators upon publication of their original paper.

DrRich agrees that, as a general proposition, he would probably rather have an extra invasive cardiac procedure than a stroke, and suspects that most people would say the same thing. But before we all buy what cardiologists are selling here, DrRich would like to make a few observations.

First, the results of the SYNTAX trial are the results. Stenting did not meet even its modest non-inferiority endpoint, and it failed to meet it by quite a lot. Once the pre-designated endpoint of a randomized clinical trial is determined, any remaining observations that can be gleaned from the large amounts of data invariably generated by such trials must be viewed as inconclusive, as merely hypothesis-generating. Such observations are not to be regarded as having sufficient statistical surety to vastly change medical practice, or to figure into evidence-based guidelines. So, another clinical study would need to be conducted to prove the hypothesis that strokes are less frequent with stenting than with bypass surgery in patients like these.

Similarly, the “SYNTAX score” – which indeed was generated and subsequently published as a “guide” for cardiologists treating patients with complex CAD, and which is therefore presumably being used today by cardiologists all over the world to select which of these complex patients they can just go ahead and stent rather than refer for bypass surgery – has no business being incorporated into clinical practice. An exercise like this – in which investigators comb retrospectively through the clinical data, selecting out patients who had good results with stenting, then devising a group of characteristics that appears to differentiate them from those who did not – cannot possibly yield a validated, widely-applicable clinical tool. If they want to claim that their SYNTAX score is clinically useful, they need to conduct another randomized clinical trial to test that hypothesis.

Next, and most remarkably, there’s the almost universally-ignored fact (reported by Dr Friedrich W Mohr, co-principle investigator of the trial), that among patients assigned to bypass surgery in the SYNTAX trial who experienced a stroke, nearly half of them had their strokes PRIOR TO SURGERY. What this means is that, in reality, the bypass surgery itself did not cause those strokes, a fact that ought to cause serious damage to the chief assertion of the stent-proponents. This fact alone turns their pony into a pig. The claim that stenting instead of surgery would have avoided these strokes is largely, if not entirely, spurious. Indeed, if anything, the fact that patients “randomized” to surgery apparently had a lot of strokes in the brief period of time between the act of randomization and the surgery itself ought to make one question whether the selection of therapy was really and truly random, or whether, somehow, patients who looked particularly sick got sent preferentially to the surgeons.

And finally, the clinical choice as it has been starkly painted by many proponents of stenting – that the real trade-off in choosing between stenting and bypass surgery in these patients is the choice between the higher risk of stroke with surgery versus the higher risk of revascularization with stenting – is incomplete and misleading. Presenting the choice in this way clearly favors stenting, and this presentation entirely explains the positive press releases and subsequent media coverage of the SYNTAX trial. But this is not a valid comparison of risks for several reasons:

1) As noted above, the actual risk of stroke posed by performing bypass surgery in the SYNTAX trial has been substantially overstated for public consumption (by implying that the surgery caused those strokes, when half occurred prior to surgery).

2) Surgeons in the SYNTAX trial most often did not employ newer techniques now in routine use, such as off-pump surgery and LIMA grafts, both of which can substantially reduce the risk of stroke and other embolic phenomena.

3) Re-occlusion of the involved arteries (which occurred about equally in both groups in this study, and which spokespersons for SYNTAX seem to brush off as not such a big deal), is an entirely different phenomenon in patients who have received DES than it is in patients who have had bypass surgery. After bypass surgery, re-occlusion tends to occur gradually, and the patient generally experiences recurrent symptoms of angina. But in DES, re-occlusion much more commonly occurs acutely, and catastrophically, leading rapidly to permanent cardiac damage and often, to sudden death.

4) Item # 3 might explain why the composite endpoint of “death, heart attack and stroke” was equal in both groups, even though stroke was significantly higher in the surgery group. That is, in order for the math to work out, the remaining dyad of “death and heart attack” necessarily must have been higher in the stent group. As far as DrRich can tell, this point has never been discussed in public.

5) In order to avoid the catastrophic re-occlusions seen with DES, cardiologists now insist that their DES patients take long-term, even life-long, Plavix, a powerful blood thinner. As the purveyor of a patient-oriented website on heart disease, DrRich cannot tell you how many distressed and stented-up patients have written to him with the following lament:

“My doctor put in one of those drug coated stents and has me on Plavix. He says if I stop the Plavix I could die, and won’t let me stop it for any reason. But I need my gallbladder out because I keep having gallbladder attacks, and the last one gave me blood poisoning. My surgeon says I need the surgery but he won’t do it unless I stop Plavix, and my cardiologist says no stopping the Plavix for any reason. What can I do? Can they just take these stents out so I can stop the Plavix?”

There is no easy answer to this question, at least not that DrRich can find. The DES patient commonly is left in the middle of a pissing match between surgeon and cardiologist. The fear of the cardiologist is that when one stops Plavix, there is a risk of sudden, catastrophic thrombosis of the coronary artery. But surgeons simply cannot operate safely on patients taking this drug. Few cardiologists seem to explain this to their patients before placing DES.

And more to the point at hand, none of the cardiologists spinning the SYNTAX trial are explaining to the public the implications of long-term Plavix. Even if their claims that stenting yields significantly fewer strokes turned out to be accurate, the choice here is clearly NOT a simple one between a higher risk of stroke on one hand, and a higher risk of needing “revascularization” (if they survive the re-occlusion, that is) on the other. There’s a lot more to think about than that, and cardiologists who imply otherwise are being either disingenuous, or delusional.

Just last week, SYNTAX investigators reported on the three-year outcomes in patients enrolled in the trial. The results, similar to the one-year outcomes, remain strongly in favor of bypass surgery at three years, and indeed, the incidence of stroke in stented patients has “caught up” with the incidence of stroke in the surgery patients.

This persistently bad news still does not really phase the cardiologists, who are now saying that the results of SYNTAX don’t really apply any more in any case, because drug-eluting stents have been improved since the trial was done.

It would appear that the cardiologists are going for some sort of official announcement to the effect that that the results of SYNTAX are, for practical purposes, indeterminate, and that what is needed is a new clinical trial, in which patients randomized to DES will receive the latest generation of stents. (Since there is a new generation of stents every year or so, this entire process can be repeated as needed until the cardiologists finally get the results they’re looking for, at which point they can declare final victory and stop.)

Summary:

All medical specialists should take a lesson from the cardiologists. In an era in which specialist organizations will no longer be writing the clinical guidelines for their own specialty, it is necessary to aggressively pre-spin any important clinical data upon which the GOD panels will be deliberating.

Considering the SYNTAX trial as a case study, one sees how it is possible to take the most straightforward results from a very straightforward clinical trial and, if not turn a negative outcome into a positive one, at least introduce enough complications, nuance, spin and uncertainty to cause any self-respecting GOD panelist to hesitate in making a definitive pronouncement on those results. Then, if you couple all the uncertainty you’ve created with a loud call for yet another clinical trial – one that will take into account new equipment, new techniques, new scoring systems &c., and that promises to clear up all the confusion you’ve dug up as a result of the last clinical trial – then you stand a decent chance of at least getting a postponement on any new guidelines harmful to your cause.

And this, you neurologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonologists and all you other, less savvy medical specialists, is how one can manage the GOD panels.

When DrRich was a little tyke, he always loved it when Uncle Harry came to visit. Uncle Harry was a large, rotund man with a ready smile and a jolly laugh, who was genuinely delighted to spend hours entertaining little DrRich and all the other children with his jokes, stories, magic tricks, and samples from the large stash of candies he always kept in his coat pockets. We all loved Uncle Harry.

But we were deceived.

Little did DrRich know, in his youthful innocence, that far from being the cheerful and beloved amateur prestidigitator delighting us with his his egg trick, Uncle Harry was actually a menace. For Uncle Harry was obese.

We now know, of course, that obese people, through their gluttony, sloth and lack of self-control, are causing untold harm to our society. They are unpleasant to sit next to on buses and airplanes. They use more than their rightful share of healthcare resources. They snore. They cause excessive tire wear (and if they sit in the same seat all the time, the tire wear will be asymmetrical, probably leading to an increase in automobile accidents).

And now, thanks to a recently published academic article, we know that the obese are largely responsible for global warming.

That global warming is taking place, and that it is being produced by mankind, of course, is a settled issue. DrRich is led to understand that a great council of hand-picked environmental scientists, taking a lesson from the Council of Nicaea, has met and has decreed it to be so. The entire body of scientific evidence has been formally considered, and like the Holy Scripture has been carefully locked down into its final form, and has been divided into orthodoxy (the study of which is holy) and heresy (the study of which leads to perdition). And having accomplished this task, the scientific community will hereafter countenance no dissension on the matter, and will admit no further debate or even any further data (unless it is corroborative data). For this is how science is supposed to work, at least for matters as critically important as global warming.

DrRich calls it Environmental Scholasticism, and believes it is about time we returned to a system of thought that was good enough for some pretty important Saints. The notion that scientific viewpoints should never be considered “closed,” and should always be open to challenge as new evidence and new ideas come to light, is a relatively recent invention initiated by the likes of Galileo and Newton, and has led to nothing but trouble (such as, for instance, global warming).

In any case, now that we know once and for all that global warming is man-made, it behooves us to figure out which men (and women) are causing it. And now, according to two eminent scholars at the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, we know that among the chief culprits are the fat. That is, fat people, through the office of their obesity itself, are responsible for a significant degree of the carbon emissions that are unarguably (and officially) destroying our planet.

This fact, heralded by radio and newspaper reports proclaiming, “Fatties Cause Global Warming,” was revealed in a “scientific” paper written by Professors Edwards and Roberts and published by the prestigious Oxford Press in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

The paper really ought to be perused directly to appreciate the elevated level of scholasticism employed by the authors, which would make even Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus themselves sit up and take notice. For this paper, which indicts a whole class of individuals with the supreme crime of global warming, a crime whose disastrous effect on our planet eventually will make the atrocities perpetrated by even Hitler and Stalin seem mere trifles in comparison, reaches its conclusions without ever offering even one tiny glimmer of actual data or evidence.

Rather, the authors rely (as true scholastics must) on the approved body of scientific work, choosing from that body an array of assumptions based on bits of sanctified data from physiology here (e.g., Basal Metabolic Rate = 11.5 X body weight in KG + 873kcal), and behavioral science there (e.g., that the average daily activities of humans consists of 7 hours sleeping, 7 hours of office work, 4 hours of light home activities, 4 hours sitting, 1 hour standing, 30 min of driving and 30 min of walking at 5 km/h), then applying these bits to an incredible chain of assumptions and estimations, to demonstrate that the negative impact of the obese on our society goes far beyond what we currently think. Indeed, through such machinations it can be concluded that the obese are melting the ice caps, killing polar bears, flooding the seacoasts, and turning our farmland, forests and fields into hot, dry, desert.

Anyone with a cheap telescope can conclude from all this that Martians, when they existed, must have been really fat.

This information, of course, will come in very handy when we are forced at last to reduce our healthcare costs, and we find we need somebody to blame. We can already discriminate against smokers with a clear conscience. And now discriminating against the obese can be accomplished not only with a clear conscience, but with a sense of duty. For, far from merely costing the healthcare system a lot of money, they are killing us all and ruining our planet.

Indeed, DrRich himself was sharpening his pitchfork, when a thought occurred to him.

The paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology comports to the classical scholastic practice of “lectio,” whereby a learned person expounds on a certain interpretation of the approved texts, and allows no dissension or questioning. But scholasticism also offers a process for “disputatio,” whereby alternative interpretations of the approved texts are permitted to be offered, and the two viewpoints are then subjected to logical analysis through which the truth is determined. (Though in classical scholasticism, the “truth” is ultimately determined by the scholar who delivered the original lectio, and the disputant is put in his/her place.*)

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*This, of course is where Martin Luther went wrong. The 95 Theses he nailed to the church door at Wittenberg was essentially an offer to engage in a classical scholastic “disputatio.” He was merely inviting a debate, like any other scholastic debate, and nothing more. The clergy, however, proved a bit too easily offended, and Luther proved a bit too tetchy, and the intended academic exercise turned into 300-years of bloodshed. DrRich sincerely hopes to avoid such a result here.

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So in the spirit of Environmental Scholasticism (but for the ultimate purpose of discovering whether the healthcare system ought to cure, ignore or euthanize the obese), DrRich would like to propose an alternative interpretation of the argument that the obese are causing global warming. That is, he will offer a disputation.

The logic of the two eminent scholars Edwards and Roberts, once you wade through the incredible morass of scientific-sounding language they have produced, essentially rests on two arguments. First, that the obese require more food energy for their basal metabolic requirements, and second, that because they are so fat they travel in cars (and very big cars at that) much more than normal people do. For these two reasons the obese produce way more carbon emissions than they are supposed to. The authors go on to calculate the excess carbon emissions produced by the obese via the aforesaid impressive chain of assumptions and estimations, and the magnitude of that excess shows us plainly that the fat are largely to blame for global warming.

This is when it occurred to DrRich that both of the basic arguments of Professors Edwards and Roberts can be easily countered, well within the bounds of the scholastic arts, using only the approved texts and without introducing any new (which is to say, heretical) data.

So, to their lectio, DrRich advances this disputation:

First, DrRich asserts that while the basal metabolic rates of the fat are indeed higher than those of the thin, one reason the thin are thin is that their non-basal metabolism is high. That is, often they habitually engage in exercise, even running marathons and triathalons, which burns many calories and produces much CO2. Scientific studies have shown that the obese tend to be still, serene, relatively inanimate. On the other hand thin people are fidgety, they pace about, wave their hands, bounce their legs, and excrete much CO2 through largely habitual and non-useful activity. Perhaps we should punish the calorie-burning thin rather than the fat. At least when the obese burn calories they are generally doing something useful.

Second, while thin people do ambulate more than the obese (indeed, this is DrRich’s first point), the assumption that the obese must make up that mileage by driving cars is entirely ridiculous. The thin actually drive far more than the obese, because they have places to go and things to do, and they’re in a hurry to get there and do it. In contrast the obese are efficient in their movements, they preserve their energy. Thus, they do not drive to the grocery for a pint of milk on a whim. They plan their trips carefully, and shop for the entire week with one trip. There is no evidence that the obese require more support from internal combustion engines than do the thin, and simple observation in fact suggests the opposite.

DrRich could, with some effort, produce a paper just as scientific-sounding as that of the Professors to “prove” his points, but will not do so here. Instead, he will just state his points as bald assertions – which (despite all the fancy math they attached to it) is just what his opponents have done.

DrRich maintains that his two assertions – which entirely counterbalance those of his opponents – make his argument equally compelling to theirs. So thus far we have a draw. But DrRich’s third assertion, which follows, wins the day.

To wit: The obese are unarguably sequestering carbon.

Storing fat, in fact, is simply a relatively efficient way to store carbon. The obese consume massive amounts of carbon in the form of food, and then they fail to burn it off (unlike thin people, who convert their food to CO2 immediately through their habitually wasteful activities). Instead, the obese store their carbon intake in massive reservoirs of fatty tissue, taking it out of circulation forever, and removing it from the carbon cycle which (we find) is so fatally damaging to the earth. Indeed (at least according to the zero-sum crowd for whom redistribution is invariably the answer to all problems), the more food consumed by the obese, the less food remains available for the thin people who would just go ahead and metabolize it, with all their jogging and whatnot, excreting lots of excess CO2 in the process.

When we finally institute our cap-and-trade economy, the obese should get a tax break based on their weight.

Carbon sequestration, of course, is one of the holy grails for environmentalists. Lots of methods for sequestration have been proposed, but none seem particularly practical. One method that has been considered is called “Biomass Burial,” in which we would take some form of biomass (plants have been the main source proposed) and bury it under the earth. The carbon from the buried biomass will stay in the ground, and will not contribute to global warming, at least not for a long time. (This is how fossil fuels are said to form in the first place.)

As long as we insist that fat people are buried (preferably after they die), and make cremation of the obese illegal, then putting the obese into the ground will constitute the much-sought biomass burial. When we bury deceased fat people, it is plain to see that we are removing tons and tons of carbon from the carbon cycle and thus from the atmosphere, and instead sequestering it in the ground. It brings a tear to DrRich’s eye to imagine that his king-sized Uncle Harry, gone now for the better part of three decades, by virtue of all that carbon he took with him under the earth continues to make the world a better place for all us former kids he used to delight with his card tricks and his stupid jokes.

And finally, this happy conclusion at which we have arrived – that the obese actually reduce global warming – at last informs those of us who are interested in healthcare how we ought to behave toward the obese. As long as fat people are maintaining (or better yet adding to) their weight – that is, as long as they continue to remove large amounts of carbon from circulation – we should encourage their continued good health. If, however, they start exercising or in some other fashion begin to burn off their large carbon deposits, then of course we might logically withhold medical care from them, or even encourage euthanasia.

But please, for the love of our precious planet and for the sake of our polar bear citizens, let us not discriminate against the obese, or discourage them from their important work.

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Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!