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| Hysterectomies being performed needlessly in 70% of cases |
| This shocking revelation comes by way of Reuters Health News Feb. 14, 2000 issue. The article reports on a recent study published in the February issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology and done at the University of California in LA. In this study researchers looked at nearly 500 women who had hysterectomies for reasons other than emergency or cancer. Of these, the researchers reported that about 70% of them were judged to be inappropriate. Some of the reasons given for judging them inappropriate was because many of the patients did not have an adequate evaluation before the surgery to determine if other types of care would be better. In a politically kind comment the researcher stated, "We found that the care leading to recommendations of hysterectomies in our cohort was suboptimal." |
| Lasik surgery may carry more risk than thought |
| NBC News February 8, 2001 ran an article on LASIK surgery and the unknown dangers. The NBC report started with, "About 2.6 million Americans are expected to get LASIK surgery, the most common form of laser eye correction, this year. Ads for it are everywhere. But they seldom mention the side effects that strike tens of thousands of patients a year." Dr. Richard Braunstein of Columbia University says, "doctors often don’t describe the dangers and patients don’t listen." He goes on to say, “Patients who have a problem often feel surprised they had a bad result from the surgery. It’s not a risk-free event, no medical procedure is a risk-free event.” According to the NBC report even the experts admit they don’t know what the complication rate is from laser vision correction. The best guess is 5 percent or less, but there have been no big studies to try to find out. |
| Liposuction can be deadly |
| The above headline came from Jan. 19, 2000 MSNBC news. The subtitle is even more chilling saying, “Liposuction has become the most common cosmetic procedure in the United States, but surgeons warned Wednesday that some people dying to get rid of that extra fat may literally pay for it with their lives.” This revelation was based on a survey of plastic surgeons. In that survey, of the 917 surgeons who answered, they reported 95 deaths in more than 496,000 operations. This works out to one death in 5,224, or 19 per 100,000. Generally, the medically accepted death rate for any kind of elective surgery, the kind not needed to save a life is 1 in 100,000. This makes liposuction 19 times more deadly than other elective surgery. Dr. Gerald Pitman of New York University, and a privately practicing plastic surgeon, said, “The problem with liposuction is not that it is unsafe. The problem is that neither the surgeons nor the patients take it seriously enough,” |
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