I just looked this up and oh wow, and I don't perceive that this situation could have only happened back then.
In the modern day, a lot of people with a lot of education will scoff at anything that hasn't been produced by science, or even anything that simply wasn't taught to them in medical school. Meanwhile, the medical system is full of inefficiencies and outdated practices because of politics and resistance to accepting or learning newer scientific findings. Worthwhile questions about simple ways to improve things often go unanswered, because nobody has been able or willing to do a large, randomized trial about it.
A recent example: Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who discovered that gastritis, gastric ulcers, and stomach cancer are caused by the bacteria H. pylori. "In 1983 they submitted their findings so far to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, but the reviewers turned their paper down, rating it in the bottom 10% of those they received in 1983."—Wikipedia. Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005 for their discovery.
Looking back I could have talked about Zika here. How many childhood viruses are we sure don't cause down-the-road issues like cancer? Most of the time when you get a random virus, the doctor has no clue which one it is and doesn't test to find out. I can remember being told by nurses at the school "there's a virus going around," and that's all we knew: there was some virus, and everyone was getting it. We just assume that these things are harmless and irrelevant once you recover from them.
There is huge room for medicine to be improved, but actually the reason for that is there is a lot of resistance to changing things in major ways despite all the things that could be done. A lot of software companies know that their key to staying on top is to improve things fast enough that a group of founders in a co-working space won't put them out of business. Hospitals don't have this pressure at all; they just have to keep providing the acceptable services that they always have, and people will still go there. I've been pressured into unnecessary procedures and even given (multiple!) sales pitches for surgeries that I haven't needed or wanted, because the hospital makes huge amounts of money from it, and consumers aren't savvy enough to know when their doctor is just trying to pad his profitability figures.
Plus, when you write software that disrupts an industry, your employees are still software developers who work and function like software developers. If you want to change healthcare, you need to change how the doctors operate.
> I've been pressured into unnecessary procedures and even given (multiple!) sales pitches for surgeries that I haven't needed or wanted, because the hospital makes huge amounts of money from it, and consumers aren't savvy enough to know when their doctor is just trying to pad his profitability figures.
That's called Fee-For-Service (FFS) and is there is active effort to replace it with quality-based schemes. Providers still get paid for individual services but the rate depends on quality metrics of their overall population. (Source: worked in software for Population Health)
The inefficiencies you describe are less from the clinical side and more from the administrative side. Many of these admin-level people are doing what they can in an incredibly complex maze of processes, most of which started for a good reason. But they are process bees, and unable to make any changes: there's a huge barrier to change as of course nobody wants to be responsible for worse outcomes / deaths due to failure to respect process—yet they are immune from repercussions if poor outcomes are cause by said process.
More to the point, clinicians live in a constant grey zone: everything is a risk tradeoff and they do what they can to get the best outcome. The adminstrative folk see things in black and white. Here's a real example: outpatient office has slightly expired meds that are life-saving if a procedure goes bad, but new meds are not available because factory got damaged by hurricane. Common-sense is that a med does go from perfect to useless overnight and a few weeks is no big deal, especially when there is no alternative. Administrative view is the meds can't be used and must immediately be discarded because having them around the office will expose them to liability during audits... yet of course doesn't understand why that means all procedures of that type would get cancelled.
I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist with 37 years of experience. Medications one day after their so-called expiration dates are just as effective as they were 24 hours earlier. Loss of potency and therapeutic efficacy over time varies tremendously depending on storage conditions: drugs kept refrigerated and in the dark will likely work just fine for YEARS after their expiration date. Pharmaceutical companies have noted that they are extremely conservative when it comes to expiration dates, much preferring to err on the side of caution. Dept. of eating your own dogfood: I had an anaphylactic/allergic reaction of unknown etiology in late 2015, my first ever; I had to go to the ER for IV steroids and Benadryl for treatment. No recurrence since. I immediately bought two Epi-Pens, one for my house and one for my car. Their expiration date was March 2017. I am completely comfortable not having purchased new ones, especially considering their now inflated prices even after all the bad publicity that focused on their markup. So I have bet my life on my belief that these "expired" epinephrine injectors will save my life should I ever have another anaphylactic/allergic reaction. However — if someone asked me for advice, I would tell them to get up-to-date ones; as a former practicing physician, this is one of those cases where what you advise is quite different from what you yourself would do.
We also assume that we only get a virus when we notice it.
The reality is probably more like: You're exposed to millions of different viral antigens over the course of your lifetime; Many of them don't have a mechanism to really hurt you, and nearly all of them are dealt with efficiently by your immune system.
Not only do they not cause symptoms, we don't even have a mechanism to identify them unless we already know what we're looking for.
In the modern day, a lot of people with a lot of education will scoff at anything that hasn't been produced by science, or even anything that simply wasn't taught to them in medical school. Meanwhile, the medical system is full of inefficiencies and outdated practices because of politics and resistance to accepting or learning newer scientific findings. Worthwhile questions about simple ways to improve things often go unanswered, because nobody has been able or willing to do a large, randomized trial about it.
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