Stan Geiger

What About Medical Ethics?

Health care, health care, health care, it’s all the rage these days. So let’s take a look at some of that.

CBS Evening News did a story yesterday. It was about excessive MRI and CT scans. According to the report, $100 billion was spent last year on such tests. The story said maybe 35 percent of the money spent was unnecessary. The story said the number of MRI and CT tests ordered doubled between 2000 and 2007.

Great, but the story mentioned nothing about what may be the real cause of the problem.

I’ll jump back to a story I saw done on News Hour on PBS a few days ago. The story was focused on integrated health systems. Integrated health systems, they say, provide much cheaper heath care to patients than the traditional way of providing services. IHS sounds great to me. They aren’t a cure-all for health-care problems. But in metro areas, they sound like a great move in the right direction. One of the biggest reasons seems to have to do with doctors working in these institutions being on salary. They aren’t paid by the patient; they aren’t paid by the procedure.

But the News Hour story took a diversion. It made mention of doctors owning pieces of businesses that do MRI and CT scans. I found that mention abominable.

So I’m a doctor. I can not only rape my patients by scheduling them for unnecessary appointments, but I can also rape them by ordering unnecessary scans from which I make money. I’d call that a medical ethics problem. I’d call that a major medical ethics problem.

Hey, physician, heal thyself.

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