{"id":5246,"date":"2013-07-07T06:14:28","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T12:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2013-07-07T06:14:28","modified_gmt":"2013-07-07T12:14:28","slug":"doctors-perform-thousands-of-unnecessary-surgeries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5246","title":{"rendered":"Doctors perform thousands of unnecessary surgeries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/m.usatoday.com\/article\/news\/2435009\">Peter Eisler and Barbara Hansen<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;If we ever learn about it at all, it&#8217;s only after the fact, if something goes wrong and the patient sees another doctor, or if Medicare or someone else comes in retroactively and does an audit,&#8221; says Rosemary Gibson, an authority on patient safety and author of The Treatment Trap, a book on unnecessary care. &#8220;The system, in my opinion, doesn&#8217;t want to know about this problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Academic studies have discovered high rates of unnecessary surgery, particularly in spinal and cardiac operations.<\/p>\n<p>A 2011 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed records for 112,000 patients who had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), a pacemaker-like device that corrects heartbeat irregularities. In 22.5% of the cases, researchers found no medical evidence to support installing the devices.<\/p>\n<p>Another 2011 study, in the journal Surgical Neurology International, evaluated 274 patients with neck and back complaints over a one-year period: More than 17% had been told they needed surgery but had no neurological or radiographic findings that indicated an operation was necessary.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I am seeing more and more patients who are told to have operations they don&#8217;t need,&#8221; says the spinal study&#8217;s author, Nancy Epstein, a neurosurgeon and chief of Neurosurgical Spine and Education at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peter Eisler and Barbara Hansen: &#8220;If we ever learn about it at all, it&#8217;s only after the fact, if something goes wrong and the patient sees another doctor, or if Medicare or someone else comes in retroactively and does an audit,&#8221; says Rosemary Gibson, an authority on patient safety and author of The Treatment Trap, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}