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Is the new professionalism and ACP's new ethics really just about following guidelines?

The Charter ( Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium.A Physician's Charter) did not deal with just the important relationship of ...

Friday, April 01, 2005

Government and Medicine, re glaucoma screening and mixed messages

In November, 2004 The DHHS announced its preventive medicine initiative for Medicare patients.This included glaucoma screening. The USPSTF recently published its recommendations regarding glaucoma screening and - as seems usually the case for this organization-found there was insufficient evidence to recommend for or against such screening.
It seems Medicare offers screening and USPSTF says they don't know if you should or not.
Thomas Sowell has correctly described the government as a " fragmentary aggregation of decision makers" so we should not be surprised with this current example of the left-hand- right- hand consistency gap. And we should not be surprised with the USPSTF 's recommendations as it seems they rarely find the evidence adequate to conclude anything .Unfortunately, physicians in the real world of giving advice to patients often do not have that luxury.

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