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...ordering a CT scan in a given medical situation are often vague and fudgeable, it's hard to claim they're over-ordered. The cancer caused by a CT scan doesn't generally show up for decades - and there are all sorts of other intervening reasons why a patient would develop cancer - so no one is too scared of getting sued for ordering a CT scan. Getting sued for not ordering one is more likely. So, the people who should be the most worried about CT scans are the patients...
...take all the computers at the Mayo clinic to compare the real risk to your life of doing a CT scan in a given situation with that of not doing one. And if the doctor can't compute that risk, there's no real way that a second-guessing patient can. But you can, and should, be more than a little reticent to have a CT scan unless it's absolutely needed...
...course, massage is hardly a breakthrough treatment - it's been used for centuries in traditional healing. The UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, which has incorporated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and western medicine since 1993, uses massage for most of its 14,000 or so patients each year, who come for treatment of conditions ranging from post-surgical pain to migraines. Dr. Ka-Kit Hui, the center's founder and director, says massage is safe and effective across the board, reflecting one of the core concepts of TCM: using physical methods to help stimulate the body to correct...
...fact, a moment of medical nostalgia that prompted the pilot study that became the foundation for the VA trial. Recalling his days as a surgical resident in the 1970s, Hinshaw says older nurses would regularly give massages to frail, elderly patients prone to delirium on postoperative drugs. The treatment - standard at the time - helped those patients. "But now most of the nurses who practice it are retired," he says, and, now, medical training adheres more strictly to quantitative means of evaluating patient progress. So, patients' individual concerns and worries are sometimes swept aside in the process, preventing them from receiving...
...care system to buy into the idea is another matter. Currently some, but not all, U.S. health insurers cover some form of massage therapy. To gain broader, more mainstream acceptance, Hinshaw says, the treatment will have to prove cost-effective as a pain-reliever. But, in most hospitals, where patients are cycled through intensive care units in a "highly choreographed sequence," there's not a lot of time or imagination to squeeze in massage therapy. Further research, perhaps showing that massage can shorten patients' hospital stays or reduce their analgesics use, may prompt hospitals to include massage more routinely...