"The plural of 'anecdote' is 'data'."
Steven Pearlstein wrote in The Washington Post, "Sebelius's cave-in on mammograms is a setback for health-care reform"Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did a marvelous job this week of undermining the move toward evidence-based medicine with her hasty and cowardly disavowal of a recommendation from her department's own task force that women under 50 are probably better off not getting routine annual mammograms.We're still cowering from facts, hiding in a Wonderland where if we just spend enough money, nobody has to die and nobody has to suffer. Until we own the tough choices and accept that both are inevitable, we're going cause death and suffering while trying to turn fantasy into reality.
. . . "How many mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, daughters and friends are we willing to lose to breast cancer while the debate goes on about the limitations of mammography?" Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, asked in an op-ed article in Thursday's Washington Post. Dr. Brawley cleverly didn't answer his own question, but the clear implication of his question was that the only acceptable number should be zero. And it is that very attitude, applied across the board to every patient and every disease, which goes a long way in explaining why ours is the most expensive, and one of the least effective, health-care systems in the industrialized world.
Labels: cancer, dr. otis brawley, health care, medicine, politics, science, steven pearlstein, washington post
posted by Lachlan @ 1:03 AM
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