Whether it's EBM or HTA or RUM or RUD ... it means the same thing ... putting cost before care. You can tell when this is happening when health ministers begin to act like junior finance ministers. Unfortunately it's happening all the time across the EU and it's pennywise and pound foolish. Oh yes -- it's also bad for patient care. Details. Details.
Don't let the alphabet soup of acronyms fool you -- it all spells care denied.
But you already know that.
Now this dangerous medicine threatens US health care policy with the current phrase de jour, "comparative effectiveness."
No matter how you cut it, evidence-based medicine based on bad evidence is bad medicine.
But you know that already too.
Here's a new paper (published jointly via the Center for the New Europe and the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest) authored by Jacob Arfwedson (a leading European thinker on this topic) and yours truly. The paper discusses where this variously named and initialed concept came from and where it's going not only in Europe but also, via our buddies at the WHO, into the developing world.
http://www.cne.org/pub_pdf/2007_05_arfwedson_pitts_ebm.pdf
And, if you're listening carefully to the rhetoric from inside-the-beltway and from the various presidential campaigns, you'll see that the concept of comparative effectiveness is entering into the general parlance.
But it's more than just another simplistic answer to a complicated question -- it's a signal that we had better start paying attention and offering real, long-term solutions -- like personalized medicine via the Critical Path.
Like we keep saying -- it ain't called "critical" for nothing.
Don't let the alphabet soup of acronyms fool you -- it all spells care denied.
But you already know that.
Now this dangerous medicine threatens US health care policy with the current phrase de jour, "comparative effectiveness."
No matter how you cut it, evidence-based medicine based on bad evidence is bad medicine.
But you know that already too.
Here's a new paper (published jointly via the Center for the New Europe and the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest) authored by Jacob Arfwedson (a leading European thinker on this topic) and yours truly. The paper discusses where this variously named and initialed concept came from and where it's going not only in Europe but also, via our buddies at the WHO, into the developing world.
http://www.cne.org/pub_pdf/2007_05_arfwedson_pitts_ebm.pdf
And, if you're listening carefully to the rhetoric from inside-the-beltway and from the various presidential campaigns, you'll see that the concept of comparative effectiveness is entering into the general parlance.
But it's more than just another simplistic answer to a complicated question -- it's a signal that we had better start paying attention and offering real, long-term solutions -- like personalized medicine via the Critical Path.
Like we keep saying -- it ain't called "critical" for nothing.
