Comment la "médecine" supprime les médecins novateurs

 De : https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-medicine-takes-away-innovative?

Traduction automatique ici : https://tinyurl.com/37n3eybs

Exploring a few of the ways the system uses financial incentives to maintain its own stability

A Midwestern Doctor

May 17, 2024

Recently, I published an article about how common (but not dangerous) skin cancers caused by sunlight exposure were lumped together with rare and dangerous skin cancers caused by a lack of sunlight exposure, thereby creating the mythology that sunlight was extremely dangerous and frequently caused deadly skin cancers. In turn, I argued this redefinition of “skin cancer” was concocted by a marketing firm that was commissioned to turn dermatology into a lucrative specialty, and that rebranding dermatologists as skin cancer fighters was decided upon since cancer treatment is always lucrative and once you really look for “skin cancers,” you can find a lot of them.

Sadly, while this strategy enriched the dermatology profession, it had a few major issues which included:

•This rebranding required dermatology to create the perception that sunlight was a scourge we needed to be protected from. In reality, sunlight is one of the most essential nutrients for the body (e.g., for mental health or preventing cancer), and avoiding it has been shown to double one’s risk of dying (e.g., smokers who get regular sunlight do as well as non-smokers who avoid it).
Note: many of the sunscreens on the market are highly toxic, while the natural ways to improve skin sunlight tolerance (e.g., dietary changes) remain virtually unknown.

•While the diagnosis of skin cancer has risen dramatically, its death rate has remained relatively unchanged. Likewise, a variety of simple, safe, and proven effective treatments exist for skin cancer that have never seen the light of day because the dermatology profession has a strong financial incentive to prevent them from ever being adopted (much in the same way they are incentivized to avoid natural solutions to sunburn).

•Because of how much money is now involved in skin cancer, it’s drawn a lot of unscrupulous parties into the business. This includes doctors who conduct all sorts of unjustifiable (and painful) procedures on Alzheimer’s patients near the end of their lives and private equity firms buying up dermatology practices that are geared towards doing as many of these procedures as possible and (to save costs) are staffed with mid-level practitioners (e.g., nurse practioners) who often make mistakes a fully trained dermatologist would never do.

•Many of the lucrative procedures done for skin cancer have side effects. For example, I’ve met numerous patients who have had significant long term problems at the excision site of their skin cancer..

Because of how many people have been affected by this scam, it struck a cord and quickly went viral (e.g., one tweet about it has received almost 3 million views). Likewise, I discovered a few well-known people had gone through exactly what it described. Consider for example this segment Jimmy Dore did about the article:

After I published the article I received a lot of feedback from my colleagues. While they generally agreed with it, they informed me that I needed to address three points:

•First, while Basal Cell Carcinomas (the common skin cancer linked to sunlight) do not metastasize and thus are never fatal if left unaddressed, over years, they can grow to become quite large (which is a scenario dermatologists periodically encounter in clinical practice). While some people choose to never do anything (and still live) most people, understandably will want that large external tumor removed. Unfortunately, if the tumor is massive at the time of its surgical removal, it is almost guaranteed to lead to “poor cosmetic outcomes” (e.g., nasty scars) since a large portion of skin has to be removed for the excision. For this reason, while BCCs are not something to be afraid of, it is important to be aware that they can continue to slowly grow for a long time, and hence they are better removed sooner rather than later.
Note: in that article, I cited a few case studies of my favorite skin cancer treatment providing a satisfactory resolution for large BCCs that would be difficult to surgically remove and achieve a good cosmetic outcome.

•Second, since the COVID vaccines came out, my colleagues have seen a small number of cases of BCCs metastasizing in their patients—something they had never seen over the decades they had been in practice prior to the COVID vaccines coming out. As there is so little data on this, I can’t say how much of a risk exists for basal cell “turbo cancers” but I need to be clear that it’s more than zero for the vaccinated.

•Third, they felt that diverting the brightest minds in medicine into dermatology (because it is a high-paying and low-stress specialty) was a critical area to focus on.