Bad Medicine

[Guest guest]

In reality about 95% of allopathic is bad medicine.

 

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050402032.\

html

 

Bad Medicine

 

 

Thursday, May 5, 2005; Page A24

 

ACCORDING TO a newly published analysis of the effectiveness of

episiotomies, the procedure has no benefits whatsoever. In fact, an

episiotomy -- a preemptory incision, theoretically intended to prevent

pregnant women from experiencing torn tissue during labor -- probably

makes such complications more likely and causes more pain and worse

side effects as well.

 

This result was not surprising to the scientists who wrote the report,

published this week in the Journal of the American Medical

Association, because the most important research on the subject had

already been done. The scientists carrying out the analysis did not

conduct new clinical studies but rather sifted through the results of

more than 900 medical articles on the subject, picked the most

informative and pooled the information. When looked at as a whole, the

evidence against this unnecessary and damaging procedure, in

widespread use since the 1930s, was overwhelming.

 

 

But although the results were already " obvious, " in the words of the

epidemiologist leading the study, they will clearly come as a surprise

to the doctors who still carry out some 1 million episiotomies in this

country every year -- if they ever hear about it. Indeed, that

scientists' long-standing doubts about the medical value of

episiotomies weren't already well known underlines the profound

problems with the transmission of new medical information within our

health care system. Just like recent large-scale studies showing that

the common prescription of estrogen to post-menopausal women carried

serious health risks, this one is further proof of the value of

testing even the most common assumptions -- and of the need for the

wider use of evidence-based medicine.

 

It is also further proof of the value of the Agency for Healthcare

Research and Quality, which commissioned the episiotomy study at the

behest of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The

agency is one of the few institutions in the country that does

regular, neutral investigations of best medical practices. Yet it is a

tiny agency, by federal government standards, and lives under the

shadow of budget-cut threats. Both money and pain could be saved if

its role were quietly expanded and its findings more loudly promoted.