Freesteel Blog » The gratuitous medical intervention department

The gratuitous medical intervention department

Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 2:11 pm Written by:

Meanwhile, get your unnecessary medical treatment here:

In 2006, Americans spent at least $14 billion on procedures involving coronary stents —little tubes that open clogged arteries to the heart. But according to the FDA, there’s no evidence that stents significantly reduce the risk of future heart attacks. Now, a major study from a top cardiologist is suggesting many of the procedures prescribed for chest pains are overused.

With big medical device makers so vested in the sale and marketing of their equipment, are some putting profits above patients?

Surely not!

According to one of the PR guys interviewed, doctors never told their patients that this treatment will prolong their lives. In what surely is one of those legally-sanctioned sleights of mind so favoured by British politicians, if you say something in a way that causes everyone to jump to the wrong conclusion, and it happens to be very beneficial to you, it’s not considered lying.

So if you’re sick and the doctor says, “Here, I’ve got this high-tech expensive treatment you could try,” do not assume that it’ll help you. Ask your lawyer if your doctor actually said that it’s the right treatment for you.

In fact it’s possible that the operation is going to help kill you by treating the symptoms and not the disease. We all prefer the quick fix because we are children at heart. Let’s not put it too bluntly — if a self-destructive habit, such as obesity due to imbibing the Standard American Diet, is made less immediately painful, then people are going to be able to carry on with it longer and more intensely and die sooner from one of its very many complications.

You can get pains in the knees due to carrying too much weight. A corporation called Stryker, part-owned by a family of billionaires, has a CEO licking his very lips at the economic prospects of the rapidly crippling generation of spoilt children — aka baby boomers — “needing” surgery and not wanting to wait till they’re closer to death to implant their limited-warranty triathlon total knee replacementswitness there the hour-long video of the intel spacemen fitting a metal knee to an “average for this area” woman of 220 pounds with a BMI of 36. This tub of lard will thus regain her mobility to hop-skip-and-jump from her front door to her car and carry on her “active” life without having any time to stop and think about all the crap she’s eating.

This is not unprecedented. The famously fat former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson became thin one year because his doctors warned him that his knees were going to get bad. Now his life will be prolonged, giving him more decades of life to promote bogus economics and the denial of climate change. So we might all die sooner.

Stryker also features in the you can’t make this up category, Rapid Prototyping for Baghdad where they…

donated several distraction osteogenesis devices, from their DynaForm and Multi-Guide II product lines… [and] also provided several complete sets of resorbable cranio-maxillofacial fixation from their Inion product line.

That’ll make up for donating $100,000 to the Democratic Party in 2002 just before they gave a blank cheque to Bush to invade Iraq.

There are cheap and effective ways to affect the quality of life ravaged by car use and obesity, just as there is a way to end the endless war for oil. But it requires absolutely going outside of the business as usual plan. By allowing huge profiteering from preventable diseases as well as preventable wars, we are telling the billionaires of this world that we want more of the same. And they work night and day to make sure that we get it. Even if it kills us.

1 Comment

  • 1. Freesteel » Blog Ar&hellip replies at 20th September 2007, 1:42 pm :

    […] 007 by Julian

    The world is fat and the resulting crumbling knees presents a business opportunity. I’ve got a got a small p […]

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