Stents and other procedures often both needless and deadly

Having a stent inserted in an artery is a commonplace medical procedure that’s done to around 700,000 Americans every single year.

If you’ve just had a heart attack, it can be a lifesaver.

But for patients with stable chest pain, it’s not just unnecessary — it can be a killer.

And stents, like a whole bunch of other medical procedures that are considered slam-dunk treatments, have turned out to be anything but.

It seems, however, that once something is done for long enough and to enough patients — even if proven to be unnecessary or dangerous — the concept will stick like some kind of medical superglue.

Too much too soon
When Bruce Peterson went to see his doctor for chest pain, he ended up with a textbook treatment — having a stent placed in an artery. And over the next eight months, he got 20 more of them.

According to Peterson’s family, all those “unneeded stents” eventually killed the Texas man.

Monica Crabtree was only 64 when she died after an unnecessary stent procedure resulted in a torn artery. Jim Simecek now needs to take blood thinners for the rest of his life, due to six needless stents put inside of him by a cardiologist in Cleveland.

All this unnecessary “stenting” is what professor of medicine Nortin Hadler at the University of North Carolina calls “one of the bleakest chapters in the history of Western medicine.”

If the whole problem revolved around hundreds of thousands of unneeded stents, that would certainly be bad enough.

But as a recent investigation by ProPublica revealed, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The publication found that it’s quite common for patients to receive all sorts of treatments that “research has shown are ineffective or even dangerous.”

And there’s a long list of reasons why. Some doctors, for example, may not be keeping up with what the current findings are. Others are experts in doing cash-cow procedures (such as stenting) and are in it strictly for the money. And very often, tests and surgeries that were once thought to be state-of-the-art care are later discredited by more current research.

Along with the enthusiasm to stent every patient who walks into a cardiologist’s office, other practices that have been found to be often unnecessary and even downright dangerous include:

• Risky synthetic hormones: During its heyday, over 90 million prescriptions for hormone therapy were being handed out every year to postmenopausal women. That is, until the treatment was found to be linked to an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke and breast cancer. But to this day, researchers are still looking for ways to push hormone therapy on unsuspecting women.
• Much ado about meniscus: Well over a decade ago, it was discovered that surgery for tears to a part of the knee called the meniscus do nothing to relieve knee pain. Yet, this is still one of the most popular surgeries out there.
• The scan scam: Having an MRI for simple low back pain is not only unnecessary, but will expose you to a dose of radiation and could even open the gates for false positives that can easily lead in turn to other unneeded procedures.

The bottom line is, unless it’s a clear medical emergency, don’t feel pressured to immediately take a doctor’s knee-jerk decision to rush you into testing, surgery or even taking drugs.

Sure, that’s often easier said than done, especially when the doctor is standing in front of you insisting that what he’s proposing is the best and only logical course of action.

But remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that children were given cough syrups containing narcotics, mercury was being used as a cure-all and bloodletting was a commonly-used medical procedure for all kinds of ailments.

That’s why getting a second or third opinion these days isn’t just a good idea, but may just save your life.

“When evidence says no, but doctors say yes” David Epstein, February 22, 2017, ProPublica, propublica.org