Health Stories of the Decade?

December 31, 2009 in Current Events | 2 comments

Dr. Richard Fogoros of the Covert Rationing blog has a series of posts listing the most overblown stories of the decade.  The stories are listed below with my commentary.

  1. The Pandemic of the Century: This is the only area where I disagree with Dr. Fogoros. SARS, Avian Flu and H1N1 (Swine) Flu were all less serious than initially feared. Dr. Rich accurately points out that having a ‘pandemic of the century’ every 3.3 years risks desensitizing people to the risk. However, a pandemic is one of the few things that can truly bring down society, and ex ante, no one knows if a serious infectious disease will end out quickly or kill millions of people. It is right to be fearful and cautious.
  2. Demonizing Obesity: Although my own research shows that marriage causes an increase in weight, the health threats of obesity are likely overblown.
  3. Preventive Medicine Saves Money.
  4. Uninsured Patients Cause ER Overcrowding: The truth is overcrowding is caused by insured Americans who cannot get in to see their primary care physicians.
  5. Vaccines and Autism: Not true.
  6. Healthcare Reform Will Lead To Rationing.  The Truth: we’re already rationing.
  7. Crocodile Tears For Primary Care.
  8. An Epidemic of Epidemics: Are heart attack epidemic, an obesity epidemic, a hypertension epidemic, crime epidemic really epidemics?  They are not contagious and all things that are bad are not ‘epidemics’.
  9. Health Insurance Companies Are Against Healthcare Reform.
  10. Mad Cow Disease: Did we clean up the food supply or was there never truly a link between eating beef and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD)?  

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  2. garth

    garth "the healthcare swami" on January 8, 2010 at 10:23 am

    The WHO changed their definition of Pandemic to fit the real world results .
    Pandemic simply new disease that’c gone worldwide use to mean a new disease that kills worldwide.

    Pandemic will be used as long as it works to get governments to open their pocket books to organizations like the WHO.

    While Obesity is not unhealthy it is undesirable that’s probably why it got linked to being unhealthy even when the body of evidence isn’t there.

    Preventive medicine doesn’t save money better treatment and elimination of useless ones saves much more money.

    Preventive medicine is a myth. Until we become immortal isn’t death a sickness by any cause a sickness?

    While there is not enough accepted proof to say Vaccines cause Autism there is plenty of accepted proof that we cannot say Vaccines DO NOT cause Autism.

    If you think the two are the same thing then retake Statistics 101.

    I agree that ER full of people with insurance that get sick or wanna get sick after hours or those that need tests done that are not allowed to be done in doctor office or cannot get done in a timely manner to be meaningful for treatment or cannot get to a specialist during business hours.

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