More on medical guidelines being hazardous to your health

A subset of pneumonia patients -those considered at risk of having a multi-drug bacterial etiology-did worse if their physician complied with ATS-IDSA guidelines according to a recent study. See here for reference to the article that was published on Lancet online.

I have blogged before about the dangerous tendency of guidelines tendency to cause unintended consequences and talked about the idiotic four hour pneumonia rule, one unintended consequence of which was the treatment of non-pneumonia patients for pneumonia within the four hour deadline.Well at least the treatment was started within 4 hours.

My longest screed about guidelines can be found here.

Guidelines can be considered part of the mind that says " medicine is too important and too complicated to be left to the individual physician and individual patient." This dangerous mind set was made explicit and championed by the former header of CMS, Dr. Don Berwick who said :


"Today, this isolated relationship [ed. the individual doctor-patient ] is no longer tenable or possible… Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care...Regulation must evolve. Regulating for improved medical care involves designing appropriate rules with authority...Health care is being rationalized through critical pathways and guidelines. The primary function of regulation in health care, especially as it affects the quality of medical care, is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.” (My bolding).

Yeah,that pesky decentralized decision making just gets in the wise of wise centralized decision making which history tells us worked out really well in the 20th century.

The best quality or guidelines rules are supported to varying degrees by randomized clinical trials but even here one should proceed slowly because the well known efficacy-effectiveness gap tolerates simplistic approaches poorly. RCTs are often small and have multiple exclusion rules and fail to capture the perplexing diversity of relevant pathophysiological variables (known and unknown) that coexist in complex, hospitalized patients. It is in the sickest patients that rules formulated by committees based on what-ever data or personal bias that the most harm can be done and in whom individual variation overwhelm premature generalizations and an eager rush to mandate treatment rules.No, all guideline writers do not always intend that their wisdom should be mandatory ( but some do) and write disclaimers at the end of the articles to that effect, but guidelines have a way of morphing from suggestions to dicta and rules the ignoring of which may have financial or other consequences for the rouge doctor.


The mandatory and quasi mandatory nature of guidelines or quality indicators as wielded by the CMS mandarins and other institutional elites become even more dangerous with the spreading use of the "disruptive physician" doctrine. Not only must you go by the rules you can't complain about them without incurring the wrath of the hospital's disruptive physician committee.This doctrine is a brilliant control mechanism.If you challenge the disruptive physician concept you are by definition disruptive.