I smelled a large, irradiated rat, and figured that this was another attempt by those who want a government take over of medical care. These folks clearly know that this is unaffordable, and are doing everything they can now, to lay the groundwork for us to cut back in the future on services we are used to and expect.

I boldly resisted the full-frontal fear mongering and went straight to the internet to find out if my intuition was correct. With a simple search, typing a cleverly constructed, and admittedly cynical, string of words into my search engine, I found this article. From reading it, I can clearly see that this rodent-sniffer of mine is working quite properly, and that I can expect to see more on this subject – coming soon to a left wing media vehicle near me!

Media driven fear softens us up for the big blows of the cutbacks we are sure to see if government run health care ever really takes hold. They do this by suggesting we should cut back on “wasteful or “dangerous” services. We are just too stupid to realize we are being victimized by a preditory medical system that only the left wing truly understands. They are protecting us from those dangerous (PROFITABLE) services, like all those frivolous mamograms and prostate cancer tests, and all the over prescribed medications that are just handed out like so many M & M’s. Barrack and the media are looking out for us. Can’t we see the docs are all about the money?

Thanks for EXPOSING us to this radiation story.

I didn’t find the scoliosis graphic that destructing. It is really amazing though. Even just looking at it, it’s very clear that they can give an excellent picture of what the bones are like.

I don’t know about the radiation risk, but the benefits seem pretty clear and they’re a lot more than you’d get from talking to someone. I think you’re probably right that they are overblown. I’d be all for any kind of imaging that would improve success of treatment or make it easier to plan it.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htchem/20090902.aspx

I’ll take it down if others have the same reaction.

Not necessary, there wasn’t any projectile vomiting involved.

For me, if a doctor says “Well, we could do the operation without first doing the imaging but that would lower our probability of success” that’s enough for me to consider it necessary.

If the doctor says “well, I’m pretty sure it’s not cancer, but there’s still a chance it is” then that’s enough for me to consider it necessary.

And talking to patients is important and it’s a good way of getting some information, but we all know how bad people are at giving good objective information on their own condition. The x-ray camera does not lie. Getting a good picture of what is happening inside is worth the trivial radiation.

        apotheosis said:

After this long on the web I thought I was fairly well insulated against most forms of visually-induced nausea, but for some reason that CT rendering of the scoliosis victim completely creeped me out.

I’m sorry about that. It was not my intention. I was trying to illustrate how much more useful and improved x-ray imaging is these days. The point I was trying to get across is that it is basically impossible to really get a good idea of how the bone structure with the traditional 2-d film x-rays, but that with the new 3d renderings of CT-scan data it is possible to get a very detailed picture of exactly what you’re dealing with before cutting into the patient.

The point was just to illustrate how much more useful and valuable x-ray imaging has become – not to cause any nausea.

I’ll take it down if others have the same reaction.

By the way: CT scans do involve more radiation than simple single-plate 2D x-rays.

I don’t really know, but in the past I’ve seen a lot of talk associated with this kind of thing where they talk a lot about profit. IE: The private profit-driven radiology clinics and hospitals love making profits by sending patients to get unnecessary imaging. The private insurance companies don’t do a good job of stopping them. The big corporations that make CT scan machines and all…

Yes, this topic has come up numerous times. I don’t know if this can be directly tied to wanting to make the entire system government-run, but it certainly has overtones of a need for a lot more regulation and private care being bad bad bad because of the profit motive.

You hear similar things in the anti-vaccine movement about the big companies making money off of vaccines. It’s a common theme that you hear: big corporations making money by making everyone sick.

Anyway, without delving too deeply into the political maelstrom…given the NYT’s propensity to carry water for a certain political party, could this current report have any bearing on the ongoing debate about health care costs? See, this is what you get with private insurance, a bunch of unnecessary and possibly dangerous tests, something like that?

This fear-mongering doesn’t help things. These tools are too valuable to avoid their use due to something like radiation fears. They’re at best exaggerated and at worst invented.

I agree that a negative test result does not mean the test was unnecessary. You don’t know until after the results come back.