About Me
Just another voice to try to put things right. There is so much blather from the news media, we idolize celebrities bad behavior, print media proffers stories that have not a whit of documentation to back up their sensationalized pieces and what’s truly important is stuck below the fold on page 22.
MorganRants 
Dave Moskowitz MD FACP said
There’s another medical horror story that dwarfs aprotinin (Trasylol). A little over five years ago, I published a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal showing it was possible to prevent 90% of kidney failure in the US. Nobody picked up the story–reporters asked for confirmation from someone in the professional kidney community. Nobody would go on record supporting the paper–not private nephrologists, who earn $10-15,000 for every hemodialysis patient; not academic nephrologists; not academic transplant surgeons who are constantly complaining that there aren’t enough organs available; not non-profit professional groups like the National Kidney Foundation, the AMA or the American Heart Association, who all collect tax-deductible donations to cure kidney disease; not the American or the International Society of Nephrology. Even more impressive, when I spoke with Sean Tunis and his assistant Sandy Foote at Medicare in 2004 (Sean was the Medical Director for CMS then), they had absolutely no interest, despite Medicare spending $25 billion a year on dialysis and transplantation.
Here’s my conclusion: nobody in the medical system–and I mean NOBODY, except the patient, who has no power, as we all know–nobody wants to eliminate diseases. Sure, they want more money to research it, but God forbid anybody should actually come up with a cure and eliminate their paycheck.
This is a far cry from medicine’s victories over rheumatic fever, TB and polio. Medicine doesn’t want no stinking victories anymore.
Here’s a rough estimate: if the National Kidney Disease Education Program, paid for by taxpayer dollars as a program within the NIH’s Kidney Institute (the NIDDK), had done its job in 2002, most of the 400,000 people currently on dialysis would not have had to go on the machine.
That dwarfs the number hurt by aprotinin by a factor of 20-fold.
What makes the story worse is that people of color have 3-5 times more kidney failure than whites. We’re essentially talking about medical slavery: keeping a $25 billion a year industry alive on the backs of blacks and Hispanics.
Think about this anytime somebody tells you what a great healthcare system we have! And don’t think a single-payer system is any better. The bureaucrats in Canada and the British National Health Service value their jobs just as much as our Medicare bureaucrats. Every other country was as resistant to my pestering them as the US.
What we clearly need is a vigorous competition on patient outcomes between two payers: one public and one private. A single payer, like any monopoly, is unaccountable.
Right now, we have two sectors, but neither one even reports patient outcomes, let alone tries to improve them.
morganwrites said
Dr, Moskowitz, You are so right! I know our medical cum health care system sucks. I will try to get the message out by making your comment a post on this site as well as another site I have.
It’s amazing, not incredible, no outrageous that your paper wasn’t even given the time of day. I can’t being to imagine how frustrated you must have been and might still be.
Should you want to raise your blood pressure further, you might want to read “The Truth About the Drug Companies” by Marcia Angell, MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and is now a member of the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. (Perhaps you could contact her?)
Wishing the best to you.
mdfairchild said
I havent really looked over this webpage very carefully just saw the discussion on Kidney dis-ease and was interested in making contact (Just for the record did anybody know you can massage kidneys, its called medical massage) As to the writers concern Im not sure what the drug was in question but I do know that medicine must change to reflect real interest in peoples health, not just kowtowing to paid for ad`s, a pharmaceutical companies great barbecue and suspect ‘substantiated’ studies done by drug companies themselves? I myself attempted to deliver a paper in NYC in 2005 to a no profit group call Fisher Foundation a friend works for. She flatly told me outright that the researchers there were not interested in anything to address Parkinsons that wasnt chemically oriented. The addressing (I am not a physician so I use care with the word ‘treat’) of parks symptoms exclusively with pharms follows the lead of tweaking in-brain systems in the hopeful attempt to balance dopamine production. In other places like Asia tai chi exercise is employed along with medications as it helps re-instill cross crawl pattern natural movement, ‘automaticity’ stimulated through changes in posture breath movement and mind the base brain or substantia nigra and limbic hindbrain is my understanding, the pro-ambulatory movement center and area of dopamine production. Also breathing regular long slow breaths done in concert with easy relaxing movements helps to stimulate endorphin release and so one could imagine (if there is any imagination left out there!) other neuro transmitter systems could come more towards homeostasis baseline or ‘all systems normal’. Part of the resistance to such offers however seems cultural or, exclusive-ist highminded and haughty, yet there is hope. I recently saw a piece on Mark Morris school of dance in NYC where Parks patients are experiencing some relief. It appears that the joyous or, preprogrammed movement of dance like tai chi allows a persons natural effortless ambulation once they are able to unburden themselves where symptoms can at least momentarily improve. The question ‘will the good doctor now become dance instructor” remains to be seen as there is such disparity between the professions ! In relation to this line of query Im glad that Sanjay Gupta has stepped down as surgeon general candidate for Obamas new team. I saw him on the Today show a few years age (another bastion of news-lessness) when asked how to best treat teen migraine syndrome responded with the usual, take this and this drug’. In the outside press specifically IONS reported several years back (1995?) Marylin Schlitz Phd wrote ‘teenage boys who learn self modification lifestyle enhancements were able to control theyre migraine symptoms even more striking it appears they were able to control therye own brain mast cells rapid growth which experts think is responsible for the aches and pains. Because complimentary medicine suggests changing ones behavior in some way we resist it if it doesnt appear to compliment and support the way we perceive our world. Even as docs now know ‘the environment and behaviors can change a person’ still its so much easier to take a pill, or is it?