Tag Archives: back pain

Vox reporter describes deep dive into medical studies on back pain

Leave a reply

Two years ago Vox began a new feature section called Show Me the Evidence. In each piece, the reporter reviews several dozen recent studies on a specific question with the goal of summarizing the consensus of the evidence on that issue.

It’s important to provide context in any article about a single study or even a couple studies, but it’s not possible in daily journalism or even shorter features to dig deeply into all (or most of) the evidence on a specific topic and look at the big picture. Continue reading →

Tara Haelle (@TaraHaelle) is AHCJ's medical studies core topic leader, guiding journalists through the jargon-filled shorthand of science and research and enabling them to translate the evidence into accurate information.

Reporters fall prey to back pain study’s shady PR push

9 Replies

Photo by planetc1

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed several 140-character conniptions I had last week over coverage of a Danish study that used antibiotics to treat low back pain.

I generally feel pretty protective of health reporters. I’m in the trenches with you. I have good days and bad days, too. Deadline reporting on medical studies is tough and sometimes undervalued for the work serious, balanced coverage requires. I’m with you.

Even so, I was dismayed by most of the stories I was reading.

Reporters were trumpeting the results of two studies published in the European Spine Journal, a less influential medical journal. Continue reading →

Brenda Goodman (@ReporterGoodman) has been a reporter for 15 years, covering health, science, and medicine for television, magazines, newspapers and the Web. She was senior news writer for WebMD before joining CNN Health. Her stories have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Parade, Self, Health, and The Boston Globe, among others.

Laser spine clinics use Internet search ads to push unproven, costly treatment

Leave a reply

Bloomberg’s David Armstrong has put together an investigation of a simple, effective and dubious new business formula, one which begins with pain in the back. In thousands of patients, this chronic back pain leads to desperation, desperation leads to Internet searches, and Internet searches lead to rosy-sounding ads for laser spine treatments from the fast-growing, high-priced, high-volume clinics that are blossoming around the country. google-back-pain

According to Armstrong, this trend is epitomized by Laser Spine, the six-year-old industry leader with $109 million in sales last year and a monster profit margin of 34.3 percent from 2006 to 2009. It typically charges about $30,000 per procedure, or about half of what any insurer would be willing to pay for a garden-variety laser-free surgery.

Laser Spine and its competitors, part of a boom in outpatient clinics operated by entrepreneurial physicians, sell a high-tech version of procedures that have been around for years — despite a lack of independent research to show that their variations lead to better outcomes. The company commands higher prices than laser-less rivals, driving up the cost of health care. Its number of malpractice claims per 1,000 surgeries is several times the rate for all U.S. outpatient surgery centers, based on insurance industry data.

How do these companies get away with charging high prices for procedures with shaky track records? Through a gap in federal regulation that will be familiar to reporters who have investigated surgical robots and other high-tech procedures.

While the Food and Drug Administration regulates the use of drugs and medical devices, there’s virtually no federal oversight for the effectiveness of surgical techniques.

“This is an issue with surgery generally,” said Robert McDonough, head of clinical policy research and development at Aetna. “Surgeons can introduce new procedures that might be significantly different from established ones with no oversight of the claims they make.”

Drug-makers’ ads — including sponsored links that appear in response to search-engine queries — must disclose their medications’ risks, under FDA rules. Ads for surgical techniques have no similar rules.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

WSJ details conflicts that drive spine fusion surgery

3 Replies

The Wall Street Journal‘s John Carreyou and Tom McGinty have taken advantage of their paper’s Medicare data stockpile to look at the conflicts of interest and piles of royalty money that drive the popularity of spine fusion treatments whose effectiveness has been disputed. Their work centers on Medtronic, which the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s John Fauber also has written about.

spine

Photo by planetc1 via Flickr

For surgeons, the financial incentives to perform spine fusions can be strong. Though hospitals often lose money on the procedure when it’s performed on Medicare patients due to the high cost of the implants, the surgeons themselves can get paid as much as $12,000 per surgery.

Complex fusions … are reimbursed by Medicare at a sharply higher rate than decompressions, to account for the elaborate spinal devices used and the longer length of surgery. Complex fusions increased 15-fold among Medicare beneficiaries with spinal stenosis from 2002 to 2007, according to the JAMA study.

A big part of many surgeons’ income lies in their consulting and royalty arrangements with device makers, although disclosure of these arrangements remains piecemeal for now. Medtronic began releasing information about its payments to surgeons on its website in June, after coming under intense scrutiny from Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa).

They’re required to keep some details under wraps, but the WSJ duo still manages to unleash anecdotes, including one about a surgeon who received “between $400,000 and $1.3 million in royalty, consulting and other payments from three spine-device makers.”

For reporters looking to understand the medical issues surrounding these procedures and why these conflicts can be detrimental to patients, see Janet Moore’s work in the Star Tribune.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Article looks at evidence behind back surgery

1 Reply

In the Star Tribune, Janet Moore seeks to counter aggressive spinal surgery with equally aggressive journalism. It’s a comprehensive take on a subject which journalists have been hammering away at piecemeal for some time now. Her anecdotes are strong, and her numbers doubly so. For example:

spine

Photo by planetc1 via Flickr

Four out of five Americans will suffer from disabling back pain during their lifetimes, according to the National Institutes of Health. Spending on back care soared between 1997 and 2005, reaching $86 billion — just shy of what Americans spent battling cancer.

As those numbers have multiplied, so have questions about the more aggressive forms of back treatment. A 2008 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, noted that the increase in back-care spending occurred “without evidence of corresponding improvement” in patients’ health.

As Moore points out, this is a debate that will continue as health reform is implemented because the new legislation will “require doctors and hospitals to demonstrate that their services are cost-effective. In that vein, the New England HealthCare Institute estimates the United States could save roughly $1 billion a year by eliminating unnecessary back surgeries.”

Minnesota is home to Medtronic, a leading maker of devices used in spinal surgery. Medtronic has consultation arrangements with a number of doctors and some experts question whether that relationship has an effect on how many spinal surgeries are done. The head of the Association for Ethics in Spine Surgery, says these financial incentives create demand for certain brands of product.

It’s a lengthy piece, and the numbers are just one component. The whole package is definitely worth a read.

Related

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.