Not Hair Loss News – Coronary-Stenting Abuse

Snippet from the article:

An article in yesterday’s financial press surveys recent high-profile cases of alleged coronary-stenting overuse, described by a sources as “just the tip of the iceberg,” and alternates them with stories from some of the patients involved. Although there are a few comments from leaders in the cardiology community that try to put the cases in perspective, the 3500-word story ultimately portrays a subspecialty too often abused by practitioners bending or ignoring the guidelines in pursuit of procedure-based profits.

“When stents are used to restore blood flow in heart-attack patients, few dispute they are beneficial,” notes the story from reporters Peter Waldman, David Armstrong, and Sydney P Freedberg published yesterday in Bloomberg BusinessWeek . But heart attacks account for only about half of stenting procedures, it notes.

“Among the other half —elective-surgery patients in stable condition—overuse, death, injury, and fraud have accompanied the devices’ use as a go-to treatment,” the article says, citing “thousands of pages of court documents and regulatory filings, interviews with 37 cardiologists and 33 heart patients or their survivors, and more than a dozen medical studies.”

Read the rest — Coronary-Stenting Abuse Cases Highlighted in Bloomberg Story

The harsh reality of the Bloomberg story shows that doctors can be immoral when it comes to making money and patient decisions, even with life threatening diseases such as coronary artery disease.

If a cardiologist abuses his power and influence on a patient with heart disease (fear of dying) to have a procedure that is highly remunerative to the cardiologist, then what do you think happens when a person with hair loss goes to a doctor who makes money doing a hair transplant surgery that may never help him, but pays the surgeon well? With hair, the situation is in many ways worse, as the doctors may not have mastered the surgery, yet can’t turn down a dollar in his/her pocket even if they really do not know what they are doing.

There are many hair transplant failures driven by a doctor’s greed for the almighty dollar. The main difference between the cardiologist doing an unnecessary procedure and a hair transplant surgeon doing a procedure that may not help the patient, is that the risk of death is far smaller with the hair transplant than the cardiac stinting.