Fueled Past Times Patient Demand? No Way.

I frankly expected amend from HealthLeaders Media, which normally has good researched as well as thoughtful stories.  This one, though, reads similar a press unloosen from the investment bankers as well as police pull firms that brand a parcel from proton beam projects.

Here's the most troubling statement:

As to a greater extent than American patients convey larn aware of the less invasive technology, they are emerging every bit a telephone substitution driver of proton beam pump increment inwards the United States, Caron says.

Who's Mr. Caron?

A partner at Chicago-based police pull theatre McDermott, Will as well as Emery, who has worked on proton beam therapy pump projects for to a greater extent than than 8 years.

Aided as well as abetted past times Leonard Arzt, executive managing director of the National Association for Proton Therapy, who says:

[C]onsumer demand for the handling has created a marketing chance for the meridian cancer centers inwards the country. "If you're inwards the radiations oncology business, yous desire the latest as well as greatest tool."

Only at the bottom of the storey create nosotros larn a genuinely thoughtful comment:

But Cigna, which also plant amongst Bluffton, SC-based CareCore National LLC to larn by proton beam therapy coverage, reimburses the therapy for entirely iii conditions, citing a lack of clinical bear witness showing the handling is superior to to a greater extent than conventional radiations therapy for most cancers. "While PBT has been used inwards patients inwards the United States since the mid-1950s, as well as although it has been shown to move effective inwards some malignancies, at that topographic point is no published information clearly demonstrating superiority over conventional forms of radiations therapy," province the Bloomfield, CT-based carrier's guidelines for radiations therapy.

If yous desire to know what's actually driving consumer demand, it is the growing render of these machines, supported past times ill-conceived Medicare funding--a truthful production of the medical-industrial complex.  I convey been writing well-nigh this debacle for several years.  In Bloomberg report:

“Proton-beam therapy is similar the expiry star of American medical technology; null as well as thus big as well as complicated has e'er been confronted past times the system,” said Amitabh Chandra, a wellness economist at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “It’s a metaphor for all the problems nosotros convey inwards American medicine.”

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