Originally Posted 7/18/2013
Like most of you, I’m not thrilled with modern healthcare. I miss how things were twenty years ago, when I had a sense of ‘having a doctor’ who actually knew me, who had my best interests in mind. I remember my father, a defense attorney in a small town in Wisconsin, telling me about the state’s ban on advertising by lawyers – a once-debated issue that is hard to visualize in the current era. He believed the ban was a positive thing, helping keep the legal profession honest and avoiding the appearance of impropriety. I remember comparing the situation to medicine and thinking ‘of course the ban is a good thing; just think of what society would think about DOCTORS, if they hung billboards for their services!
Those debates must appear bizarre to young people now, who can’t drive a mile without hearing or seeing ads urging people to sue over work grievances, accidental injuries, discrimination, medication side effects, malpractice… while hospitals and doctors compete for space for their own ads for pain clinics, wellness centers, hip and knee replacements, or robotic surgery.
Billboards announce the next great thing that one hospital has that others don’t, one medical gimmick replacing another. ‘Pain treatment’ is one of the biggest healthcare scams of the past 20 years, with ads promising treatment for chronic pain in an ‘advanced’ or ‘collaborative’ manner. The scam is easy to see if one drops all positive assumptions about medicine—and health insurance– and observes what happens to patients who use pain clinics. Follow two hypothetical patients, one with insurance and another with no money or insurance, with the exact same injury—let’s say back pain from lifting crates in a factory every night for several years. Their experiences will demonstrate why being insured is not always in one’s best interest.
Our uninsured man develops pain in his lower back that does not extend into his legs, without leg weakness or incontinence. He goes to urgent care and pays cash for the visit, and tells the doctor that he can’t afford to be referred anywhere. The doc tells him to avoid heavy lifting for a week, and when he returns to work, to lift with his legs and knees instead of bending his back. He is told to stretch at least 30 minutes every morning and evening and to exercise each day. Back pain usually comes from a combination of ‘pain generators’ in muscle, bones, tendons, ligaments, and nerves in the lower back. But the body has amazing recuperative powers, and if our hypothetical patient stretches, exercises, and avoids repeat injury, he will get better over several weeks. Not a bad outcome for $150!
The guy with insurance goes to his doctor, who prescribes 90 tablets of Percocet and schedules an MRI. This doctor doesn’t explain the need for stretching, assuming that the patient will hear all that from the next doc he is referring to… or maybe he recommends stretching and exercise, but the Percocet helps the patient feel less restless while sitting in front of the TV, reducing the stretching or exercising that would have helped him feel better. When the MRI shows ‘degenerative disk disease’ (as it always does in people over 40), the doc refers him to a neurologist for EMGs. The patient meanwhile sees his chiropractor for 5 ‘adjustments’ per week. The neurologist refers him to a physical medicine and rehab doc, who orders physical therapy. All of these steps in the process extract their pound of flesh, paid by either the patient or society (through higher insurance rates).
The people who are getting rich in medicine know that it’s all about PROCEDURES. Our insured patient already paid over $1000 for his share of the costs for a lumbar spine MRI (not to mention the plain films and a CT scan done first, just in case they might be helpful). He or his insurer paid another grand for the EMG. The chiropractor cost another 1-4 grand, depending on the patient’s zip code.
The money really starts to flow when the rehab doc sends him to a pain clinic. The pain clinic starts with more x-rays, CT, and MRIs, claiming that THEIR techniques will give a better look at things that the others may have missed. For the most common diagnoses—degenerative disc disease, lumbar strain, or facet arthropathy– treatment choices include lumbar epidural steroid injections, selective nerve root injections, and local anesthetic ‘trigger point’ injections to relax tightened muscles. The doctor’s charge to do an epidural or nerve root injection? About $500-$1200, for a procedure that takes about 15 minutes. An efficient doc could easily do 10-12 injections per day. If the doc attended one of those meetings that teach ‘maximizing reimbursement’—meetings often held on cruises or tropical islands—the doc calls his office an ‘ambulatory care center’ so that he can bill ‘facility fees’, turning a $700 epidural into a $5000 ‘short stay.’
I hear what you’re thinking—that relief from back pain is WORTH the $5,000-$10,000 cost for this patient. What if the procedure provides only partial relief—the typical result? Or What if the epidural steroid injection only MIGHT provide pain relief— but probably WON’T? Is it still worth as much? What if the pain relief won’t start for a few weeks and only lasts a month or two, and then the shot must be repeated? What if the injection can be done only 3-4 times per year, and the patient has less than a month of relief each time. Is 3 months of moderate reduction in pain worth $15,000?
The scam is aided by a simple fact that patients often forget: most minor injuries will heal on their own without medical intervention, as long as re-injury is avoided. It is no coincidence that many medical procedures or treatments take ‘a few weeks’ to work, the amount of time most often associated with natural healing. You’ve heard the joke…. With treatment, you’ll improve in 14 days; otherwise a couple weeks! Present-day back injuries last about as long as they did 50 years ago—even though we now spend tens of thousands of dollars per injury, rather than a few weeks of ‘taking it easy.’
I’m taking care to present examples that give medicine the benefit of the doubt. I’m not mentioning the many injections done on people despite clear evidence, on exam or MRI, that the injection will do nothing for their pain. I’m not talking about trigger injections (done thousands of times each day throughout the US) that hurt like blazes during the shot, giving the illusion of pain relief (and nothing else) when the needle is removed. I’m not talking about the many MRI’s, ultrasounds, CTs, and EMGs that could be replaced by a smart doctor with basic physical examination skills.
And I’m not talking (until now) about the people who suffer from iatrogenic addiction—- those who go to pain clinics for aches and pains that will either gradually go away or won’t ever go away, that in either case have a trajectory of recovery that can’t be altered by the pain clinic. The patients are prescribed opioids, and asked to return for one procedure after another. The patients notice that the procedures are doing nothing for the pain, but they return over and over for refills on the pain pills that they now physically depend on.
The insurer eventually balks at paying for more procedures… and at this same point the pain clinic docs decide that further attempts at pain relief would be pointless. The doc tells the patient that since he is doing nothing but prescribing pain pills, the patient should go back to his primary care doctor and never return to the pain clinic (unless a new, reimbursable injury comes along). The referring doctor is not comfortable prescribing the same large dose of narcotics, and tells the patient to ‘taper off the pain pills’—- something that most people just can’t do. The patient inevitably violates the opioid treatment contract by asking for early refills, smoking marijuana, missing an appointment, running out of money to pay for visits, seeing another doctor, using the wrong pharmacy, etc…. allowing the doctor to blame the patient for breaking the rules, requiring discharge.
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