New and better ways to distinguish "athlete's heart" from abnormal heart enlargement

It has been long recognized that athletes may have larger hearts and changes on the EKG that are difficult to distinguish from abnormal findings such as those seen in an abnormally enlarged thickened  left ventricle with hypertrophic muscles as is seen in long standing hypertension and in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy(HCM).

In fact . athletes have enlarged heart muscle as well and cardiologists have attempted to provided some wall thickness values above  which it indicated abnormality. . A distinction  based on various  EKG criteria have never been that reliable.

In addition, all athletic activity does not seem to bring out the same type of physiological adaptive changes. A distinction is typically made between endurance athletes and strength athletes, recognizing that some athletes do both endurance and strength training.

Generally endurance athletes increase cardiac output under conditions of  reduced peripheral resistance while strength trained athletes increase cardiac output against increased peripheral resistance. It would  be expected that these difference would be reflected in the heart's adaption

The stylized facts are that  the endurance athletes have increased wall thickness  as do the strength folks but endurance athletes have larger chambers . e.g left atrial size and left ventricular diastolic diameters. The usual definition of the upper limit of normal for the left atrium is often said to be 35ml while one  study of endurance athletes has shown value of 37.7 ml.The left  ventricular wall is sometimes greater than 13 mm ( in one study of elite endurance athletes 13% were greater than 13 but none above 15 mm.  About 1/3 of elite endurance athletes have LV cavity end diastolic greater than 60 ml. whereas  upper  normal is typically consisted 55 ml .Typically endurance  athletes are said to have eccentric hypertrophy while endurance athletes have concentric but that concept has  been challenged.

At least one study reported that endurance athletes had indicators of  better diastolic function that do strength trained athletes. (Vinereanu,D, Clin Sci 2002).However, overall the data are conflicting as to whether endurance exercise improves diastolic filling apart from  heart rate changes and
 as to whether any diastolic function improvement persists in senior athletes to significantly mitigate the seemingly universal age related increases   myocardial stiffness. ( Perhaps another example of the Woody Allen physiological maxim ,paraphrased when you get old everything  that should be soft gets hard and everything that should be hard gets soft.)

In any event the athletes hearts seems to work quite well particularity when compared with the enlarged hearts that can result from hypertension both in terms of pumping  the blood during systole but also  in rapidly refilling the ventricular chamber in diastole preparatory for the next ejection

Athletes hearts  pump more effectively  blood during systole This is   usually expressed as as EF, value ( ejection fraction) which is  generally greater in endurance athletes than in  normals but the range overlaps. .But also the athlete's  ventricles  fill faster in the relation phase of the left ventricle , i.e. diastole so their enhanced cardiac output results from more filling  and more ejection giving them higher stroke volumes.

Using various indicators of diastolic function ( such as the early phase of filling versus the later phase of filling (an e/a ratio being one such measure) it has been  clearly demonstrated that left ventricular filing is normal or supra normal in the endurance  athletes with increased wall thickness while the opposite occur to varying degrees in hypertensive heart disease and other causes of LVH such as aortic stenosis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy .

Newer echo techniques have provided even more evidence of a distinction   between the enhanced  cardiac function of the endurance trained athletes and those with hypertensive heart disease and to aid in the differential diagnosis of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

In the last ten years a technique referred to as deformation imaging ( which can be subdivided into 1)TDI and 2)speckle-tracing 2D strain imaging)  has provide a new way to elucidate cardiac physiology. The techniques can distinguish between active and passive myocardial segment motion.

In echo speak "strain" mean deformation, unlike the  everyone day English language meaning  and these techniques measure strain and strain rate.Strain is considered the fractional change in length of a myocardial segment and can be expressed as a percentage.Ultra sound images contain natural acoustic markers, called speckles, which can be tracked as muscle segments move during contraction and relaxation and actively contracting muscles segment can be distinguished from areas moving poorly. 

Speckle tracing studies have shown that the ventricular hypertrophy as in  hypertension is associated with decrease strain ,that is less deformation, which is functionally disadvantageous while the hypertrophy of endurance athletes does not differ appreciably from normal controls and is not associated with  functional impairment.In other words this is  an advantageous remodeling.

A similar distinction between pathological left ventricular hypertrophy and  physiologic athletic hypertrophy  has been made using MRIs of the heart. ( Peterson SE, 2005 , J Cardiovas Mag Reason 2005:7,(3) 551. Speckle tracing is much less expensive .

For the most part newer testing techniques have done away with concerns about exercise causing the heart to enlarge in a deleterious physiological way with the interesting possible exceptions of  harmful changes or remodeling of the right ventricle and of the left atrium with a putative increased risk of atrial fibrillation. Several authors have argued and provided some evidence that prolonged endurance type exercise can bring about a condition similar to an inherited disease called arrhythmogenic  right ventricular hypertrophy (ARRV), a topic I wrote about before see here.

addendum: added 10/1/15 5:46 PM.  Here is more on the differences between strength athletes and endurance athletes. Rowers were compared with Long distance runners and the authors fond  that the runners had larger left ventricular volumes,lower and in the normal range for ventricular mass and a tendency to less thickened left ventricular walls.  (Wasfy,M Endurance exercise-induced cardiac remodeling: Not all Sports are created equal,Journal of the American society of echocardiography, 2015,Sept 9


addendum 2/9/16. Minor wording changes made in last paragraph.
  addendum 6/6/21 Several typos corrected.

George Soros's Open Society Institute and American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation programs,strange bedfellows or birds of a feather?

Medical Professionalism for the new Millennium; A Physician's Charter was published in 2002 both  in the Annals of Internal Medicine and in the Lancet reflecting an international authorship. In 2003, George Soros's Open Society Institute founded a think tank, advocacy organization called Institute on Medicine as a Profession. (IMAP) with a 7.5 million dollar grant.

Later two grants ($350,000 in 2003 and $ 60,000 in 2008) was  given to IMAP by the ABIMF.ABIMF is chiefly funded by the ABIM and has a common leadership roster.In turn ABIM makes its money by testing internists and managing their Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program,a program that has generated a firestorm of protests from practicing internists and a serious effort to establish a rival means of maintenance of certification.

What is the ACP-ABIM(F) version of medical professionalism. Among other features, this "charter" calls for physicians to be "stewards of society's medical resources" and to work for social justice. It speaks of an obligation not only to the patient but to society as least in the sense of conservation of these allegedly common resources and to work for a just distribution of these resources.

The Charter was not cut from whole cloth, neither was it a tailored answer to the alleged problems that were claimed to be causing physicians angst  in the new millennium.Rather it was another manifestation or application of the new Bioethics about which Pope Benedict XVI had this to say in his 2010 address to the Pontifical Academy for Life:

"Under traditional medical ethics the guiding principle is 'do no harm". But contemporary bioethics abandons this in an effort to find the utilitarian goal of the greatest good for the greatest number Under these principles preserving the life of the human patient is not considered paramount."

Wait. what  does the charter have to say about greatest good for the greatest number? Explicitly it said nothing but advocating social justice.

Social Justice is a loose , vague and indeterminate term, which although it has a useful rhetorical value   might puzzle physicians as to how they might actually work for the nebulous social justice in their everyday practices. The ABIMF in its publications and on its website made it explicit -follow the guidelines. In that way they claim  resources would be wisely distributed and fairly  thus furthering social justice. Here we get the greatest good for the greatest number in the collective. The collective may just be the HMO or ACO or possibly all members of society.So while the Charter seems on the surface to be medical ethical Principlism , a la Beaumont and Childress, underneath there is a strong utilitarian initiative .

ABIMF's mission appears to be to further this brand of medical professionalism and to
champion the "Choosing Wisely" initiative.

 The Soros funded IMAP describes its mission in the following way:
Their vision of medical professionalism  embodies 4 values;

1) altruism that is a unwavering commitment to the patient.
2)Physician Self regulation
3)Maintenance of technical competence-a commitment to life long learning
4)Civic engagement "Physicians should enlarge their scope of concerns from the welfare of the individual patient to a concern for the welfare of all patients" ( my underlining)

This parallels the outline of the Charter which continues to speak of duty to the patient but an additional obligation was grafted on to that traditional prime directive namely to conserve resources and work for an efficient and fair distribution of resources.Numbers 1,2, and 3 add nothing to traditional medical ethics but number 4 is another matter.

So IMAP more or less recapitulates the Charter blending the traditional mom and apple pie medical ethics with a new obligation to work somehow for all patients.It should be no mystery why ABIMF might share some of its resources with another advocacy group with similar if not identical goals. My question is why does Soros wish to promote the new professionalism i.e. the Charter ?

So here it is- the physician's goal should not just be the welfare of her patient but rather the welfare of everyone.And the best way she could accomplish that goal is to follow guidelines which will provide the best bang for the buck (efficient "parsimonious care") .And one way to save money is  to limit care to the elderly which is being sold as improving the quality of life in folks in their twilight days and months.

One of the leaders in the effort to limit care to the elderly , Dr.Joanne Lynn,perhaps said more that she intended when she said:"Not only the right thing to do, it makes good business sense".

Good business sense, is that what Choosing Wisely is all about?And whose business are we talking about.


 Addendum: 4/1/16 Minor changes in wording made.

Still more data linking endurance exercise and atrial fibrillation

A number of  studies have shown a relationship between long time endurance exercise and increased  risk of atrial arrhythmias. and there is a growing consensus that this is a causal relationship. As a long time marathoner I don't welcome the news but I cannot no longer ignore it and have to worry about it. 

One of Bradford Hill's classic  criteria for assessing if a relationship between variables is causal is the dose response principle also referred to as biological gradient. This simply means that a larger dose or exposure should lead to a greater incidence of the effects.Myrstar and co authors  have published a study demonstrating a dose response relationship between years of endurance type activity and risk of atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter. In this article Myrstad and co-authors reported an odds ratio of development of atrial fibrillation of 1.16 per ten years of endurance exercise. (confidence interval 1.06--1.29).

 In another study from Norway the same lead author reported in regard to  a cohort study  of 2626 long time cross-country skiers and 2326 people from the general population. He found a prevalence of 12.3%  of self reported atrial fibrillation (AF) in the skiers versus 5% in the non-skiers. Of those, 64% continued to engage in regular endurance exercise after the onset of AF.Interestingly some 1/3 of AF patients did not use oral anticoagulants even though they had a CHA2DS-VASc scored of greater than or equal to 2,a score that current conventional medical wisdom believes anti coagulation is needed to decrease stroke risk.

 To get some approximation of context consider the ATRIA study (Go,A, et al, JAMA 2001:285:2370) which reported a prevalence of 0.1% in those younger than 60 years,3.8 % age 60 and older, and 9 % age 90 and older More extensive data can be found here in the discussion of a pooled analysis of five randomized clinical trials in which the relative risk of a fib increased 1.4 by decade ( C.I. 1.1 to 1.8). Some older runners would like to take those factoids to suggest that getting old is even more risky than running.

 An enlarged left atrium  has thought to be the  likely link between atrial fibrillation and hypertension.Some long term endurance athletes have been demonstrated to have larger left atria and while it can be considered a "physiological" adaption to increased exercise and periods of increased cardiac output the increased surface per se  may predispose to atrial rhythm mischief.Is the enlarged athletes' left atrium less pathological than that of the long term hypertensive patient?


Most of this is a "dog bites man" or duhh story but I continue to be impressed with how easily one can effortlessly find medical articles even in Journals that are not that widely read. The second article mentioned above was first published  in the official journal of the German Cardiac Society, one that I do not typically read. The ease with which you can follow current journal articles on a number of topics of your choosing on the free app QxMD is amazing particularly for someone who grew up wrestling the unwieldy Index Medicus tomes and wandering the medical library book stacks to find the volume of interest missing.You can easily learn more in an hour with that app and your tablet than you could in all day at the medical library.


addendum:10/1/15 some editorial flourishes made.

addendum: 12/2/2016 Another article presented some  data on dose response relationship.Anderson and co workers from Sweden compered the risk of atrial fib and brady rhythm problems in a large cohort of cross-country skiers. Those who took part in five or more events were compared with those who only completed on one  90km race and found a hazard ratio of 1.3 (1.08--1.58) for those who raced more. Though a increased risk of atrial fibrillation gets most of the attention , this study  showed a greater risk of bradyarrhythmias with a HR.of 1.85 , though not statistically  significant with a CI of 0.97--3.54.The quantification of the "dose" is crude as well but data are suggestive.
(Anderson, K et al., Risk of arrhythmias in 52 775 long-distance cross country Skiers: a cohort study.
European Heart Journal 2013 34: 3264 )

Born to run (slowly) and to loaf-The Leiberman hypothesis?

Harvard Professor David E. Leiberman  has taken Theodosius Dobzhansky's maxim to heart; "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Leiberman,also known as the barefoot professor for his interest and advocacy of barefoot running ,expounded his thesis along with co author Dennis Bramble in a 2004 article in Nature entitled " Endurance running and the evolution of the genus homo."

Quoting from the above article ;" The fossil evidence of these features [features that facilitate endurance running] suggests that endurance running is a derived capability of the genus Homo, originating about 2 million years and may have been instrumental in the evolution of he human body form."


Leiberman's theory suggests that Homo evolved the ability to run long distances and hunt and forage in the heat before the human brain grew and humans got smart enough to  rule the roost .

The creature than evolved  could be described as a fur less,short toed,sweaty bipedal endurance athlete who was typically at the edge of negative calorie balance and who tended to loaf and rest whenever he could to conserve energy as food was scarce and difficult to obtain.These were the hunter gatherers whose survival depended on their ability to track and hunt animals over long distances in the climates of the African savannas as well as to dig around and find what they could to eat. That stylized story is that is how our ancestors lived as recently as some 600 generations ago, according to some estimates.

As the pressing need to work very hard physically became less and less necessary for more and more people the evolved human's drive to rest and conserve energy persisted and when not countered by lots of exercise obesity and the modern maladies such as  arterial diseases and type 2 diabetes went from rare to increasingly common.

It is an appealing story,one that resonates with those among us who like to do endurance type exercise. This includes Leiberman .  Much of it seems to make sense and is rich in physiologic insights, but is it all  just an "as if story"?

Hans Vaihinger is known as the philosopher of "as if". His view was that one should not ask if a theory or belief was true in some deep probably unknowable objective sense but rather is it useful to act as if the theory were true. ( I think Milton Freidman spoke of economic models or theory in that way, that is are they useful.) From reading descriptions of Vaihinger's work, I think it seems to him maybe most stories are "as if stories". George Box is quoted as saying that all models are wrong but some are useful.

Leiberman writes and speaks well in an entertaining way and regales us with mechanisms  such why tighter ( rather than more lax) Achilles tendon enables running and why longer toes are a detriment to running  and how sweating works much better as a heat dissipation mechanism than panting.

Bob Wachter's defense of ABIM's shenanigans and Mel Brooks

Dr. Bob Wachter,former chair of the ABIM, has spoken out in defense of ABIM and , of course, of himself.

Several medical bloggers have offered their critique of his comments including Michel Accad,  ,Walter Bond. and Dr RW..In my opinion all make  some good points with which I agree.

But I think Med Brooks' comments  may be the most appropriate.

Can Dr. Cassel and her collaborators at the National Quality Forum repeal Goodhart's Law?

In the December 4, 2014 issue of the NEJM, Dr. Chistine K.Cassel et al expound on performance measures.She freely admits there have been some problems but also apparently some successes.It is just a matter of learning from the mistakes and  leveraging the successes. We just have to work harder and be smarter. "Getting More Performance from Performance Measurements" Cassel, CK et al , NEJM 371,23 2014). When people talk about "leveraging" you can be sure the tripe level is dangerous high.

She offers her explanation of  why the notorious "four hour pneumonia rule" did not work out well. That particular clinical situation was "not the right place to intervene". .."There was too much clinical variability for the measure to help physicians on exactly the right course of action." True enough but that was not the reason.

The underlying insight is found in Goodhart's Law which states that when a measure becomes a target it loses its value as a measure.A more basic insight is that people respond to incentives. When folks are graded, or rewarded or punished based on some measure they will find ways to achieve that target and if better care results fine but there is not reason to think apriori  that it will. Teachers will teach to the tests and students will study for the test regardless of how well or how badly the test reflects the students' mastery of the subject.


Goodhart wrote about his "law " in 1975 and in 1976 Donald Campbell wrote in regard to education and testing :

"achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.

It is tempting to substitute medical care for  the teaching process and we get "But when quality measures become the goal of the medical care process , they both loose their value as indicators of medical care and distort the process in undesirable ways."

I submit that devising better measures will not change the situation.

Dr. Cassel et al would disagree with my view and she closes her commentary with  the usual boiler plate words about "stakeholders"  and better quality down the road. "All stakeholder groups are now invested in getting more  performance out of measurements ,which should ultimately drive the care improvements that patients need and deserve."

 The economist,Arnold Kling, give his take on performance measures or P4P  here.

I have commented on this general subject before and here  the issue of a conflict between P4P and traditional medical ethics is talked about.

The folks at the National Quality Forum can no more negate Goodhart's law than they can make it now longer the case that people respond to incentives.The stakeholders of which Cassel speaks , of course, included the NQF itself as it is in the business of writing quality standards .

There are some amazing octogenarians out there

Some  know-it-all-officious-busybodies   medical progressive elite presume to know when various medical procedures should be limited on the basis of age. Some even presume to know how long someone will live as in recommendations regarding limiting of medical procedures for those deemed to have less than ten years life expectancy or using 75 as a cut off date for certain type of screening tests.My pathology professor in medical school was fond of saying when you tell someone how long he has to live they may piss on your grave.Spock's "live long and prosper" butts up against Dr.Zeke's proposed forgoing of preventive measures for those 75 and older, well at least for him, or so he claims now.

Two recent journal articles shed some physiological light on  some  folks in their 80s,folks about whom some of the progressive elite would desire to limit medical care.

Trine Karlsen et al described a remarkable 80 year old Norwegian.The authors believe that the subject of their study may have a world record for maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). for his age 50,ml/kilo/min.Accordingly to the authors this value is compatible of a normal, active, non endurance trained 35 year old Norwegian man.(How to be 80 year old and have a V02max of a 35 year old, Case Reports in Medicine, Vol 2015, article id 909561). The "how " seems to be to have great genes and to be very physically active.


 To put V02 max  in some perspective; It is a measure of the highest rate at which oxygen can be utilized by the body during intense exercise.It is a function of how much blood the heart can deliver to the muscle ( cardiac output) and how  much oxygen the muscles can take up measured by the a-v oxygen difference.


It is generally believed to peak somewhere between age 25 and 35 and decreases afterwards. Various estimates of the rate of decline have been made. A stylized version is that the decrement is of the order of 5-10 % per decade until about age 70 and then V02 max declines more rapidly.For those who continue to do endurance exercise training the decrease is in the 5% per decade range.Some data indicate that endurance athletes' VO2 max actually decreases more per decade in absolute terms ( ml/minute/kilogram) but since they begin the decline with a higher absolute value their percentage decline is about half of that of the non trained healthy person. In that regard as in most things there are some conflicting data and considerable individual variation. Karlsen's subject has his 02 max measured at age45 so that the calculated decrease in his 02 max  from age 45 to age 80 was a remarkable 2.3 ml/min/kilo per decade while previous reports suggested the average decrease is 5.4 ml/min/kilo per decade. At age 25 he was measured at 75 ml,min/kilo.

World class endurance athletes typically have values in the 70s and 80's. The value of 90 is often quoted as the highest record, this in a 24 year old cross country skier while other publications quote the recording of 95 . The value of 17.5 ml/kilo/min ( 5 mets)  has has been labelled the aerobic frailty level, the value below which a person is by one  imprecise definition, frail, and would find the activities of every day life consuming such a high percentage of their O2 max that fatigue would greatly limit function.A value of 7 ml oxygen /kilo is said to be the lowest level compatible with life.Endurance exercise training programs typically increase 02 max by 10-15% ( with the occasional outlier of more than 30%) but those folks in the 70 plus range can thank their parents ( at least one of them) for their exercise capacity.The sled dogs who race have 02 max values in the range of 240!


Scott Trappe and co authors in an earlier article in the Journal of Applied Physiology ( see here) published detailed physiological data including results of muscle biopsies and muscle enzyme studies on 15 active healthy octogenarians (one actually was 91).Nine were long time endurance athletes and 6 were age matched healthy untrained men without serious medical conditions and who were fit enough to do the exercise testing. Not only had the athletic group been competitive cross country skiers in their youth, they had continued with vigorous programs and all had trained  on average 8 hours a week for the last fifty years. ( Fifty years is not a typo).The endurance athletes had 02 max values between 34 and 42 while the healthy non endurance folks had on average a 21.

And then there is Ed Whitlock.See here for details of his setting the marathon time record for a 82 year old human . He finished at 3:41:58 which is nine minutes 49 second per mile.Whitlock is also noted for being the only man to run a sub three hour marathon at age 70 or older.Estimating his V02 max using table 2.3 from Tim Noakes's Lore of Running ( which is derived from data of Davies and Thompson) gives a value of about 48 ml/kilo/min, which is close to Karlsen's subject's measured value..

 
addendum: 8/28/2015
Ed Whitlock is not the only 80something who ran a sub four hour marathon. Ed Benham ran a 3:48 marathon at age 82 and Harold Wilson did 3:58 in Boston at age 80. In the half marathon category Anne Garrett ran 2:13 at age 80 .

 Addendum: 1/19/16 Thee were four men 80 and over ( who made the six hour cutoff, in the 2016 Houston Marathon, the fastest of which ran a 4 hour 23 minute race. According to the guesstimate form the above quoted table from Noakes,he would have a 02 max of  39-40 , not too far from Karlsen's subject and way out of the curve for 80 years olds. 

do you need a physician to order your blood tests?

There are a number of folks who want to eliminate at least one aspect of  gate-keeper role of the physician  or at least allow people  to order blood tests without getting a physician's order.

To name a few: Dr Eric Topol,Elizabeth Homes,and apparently the governor of Arizona.

Elizabeth Holmes is founder and CEO of a company named Theranos,which has developed a technology to enable a very large number of blood tests to be done from a few drops of blood,less than the tube drawn on a standard veni- puncture.

In April 2015 , the governor of Arizona signed a statute "allowing" clinical labs to perform blood tests without a physician's health care provider's order.

Laboratory Corporation of American has recently announced that they will perform lab tests on folks without requiring a doctor's order. See here for article.

According to the Bloomberg article linked above some twenty states already allow blood tests to be done without a physician's order.However according to this chart more states than that allow what is call "direct access testing". (This table is from a website called Longevity Testing.Com and I cannot attest to its accuracy as there are no links to supporting data.)

LabCorp and Quest and other large commercial labs have seen decrease in fees from CMS cuts and also from fewer referrals from independent physician's office as more doctors move to large groups or are being bought out by hospitals,who have their own labs. So they obviously welcome more direct assess customers.

In some instances a person's copay for a visit to a doctor to get a hall pass for a blood test may be more than the fee for service going the direct access route plus you do not have to wait in the doc;s office to see him and then wait for his office to send you your results.Of course,this assumes that the quality and resource conservation guidelines that he is "encouraged"   to follow will "allow" you to have the test.As you know the American College of Physicians and the American Board of Internal Medicine have declared that physicians are the "stewards" of the allegedly collectively owned national medical resources

Direct access testing fits in nicely with Dr. Topol's latest book The Patient will see you now in which he argues that smart phone based technology will go a long way to the democratization of medicine and the continuing stamping out of the lingering paternalism that was a regular feature of medicine for centuries.

Bad news for pediatricians-good news for ABMS and the hegemony of the progressive medical elite

See this blog posting regarding the unfortunate situation regarding board certification for pediatricians and how, at least so far, the  monopoly of ABMS is preserved.

If possible the MOC situation regarding peds is even worse that that regarding internists and their board, the ABIM.

One major insurer has refused to recognize certification from anything other than a ABMS recognized board.

Quoting Dr. Med Edison in her blog:

 " After months of speculation about insurer acceptance of anything other than ABMS certification, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is on record refusing certification through the National Board of Physicians and Surgeons. To my knowledge, they are the first to do so.
This is actually a big deal for pediatricians in Michigan. For our internist friends, the ABIM has slowed down implementation of MOC. But the American Board of Pediatrics refuses to listen to pediatricians, and instead instructs insurers to “check” our certificates yearly."

From the narrative related by Dr. Edison the folks at ABIM seem like avuncular colleagues compared to the even more hard nosed folks at the pediatrics board.

It may be too early to say  but it looks like we might see another situation in which the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. If other insurance companies refuse to accept NBPAS certification the viability  of that organization is in doubt.

Who elected the ACP as the"conscience" of medicine?

In a embarrassing display of  self congratulatory praise , in this  commentary Bob Doherty ,senior vice president of the American College of Physicians office of government affairs and public policy, makes the assertion that internists and particularly  the ACP are the "conscience of medicine".

How does he support that claim? First, he cites the advocacy that ACP has provided for universal health care and for other causes..He also quotes from a commentary from Lancet which declared that internists and ACP were the conscience of medicine.Further, he makes the claim that the ACP has always put the patient first even if some aspect of their advocacy might not be in the best interests of internists,while other professional organizations lobby in Washington  for their parochial interests. In his view apparently ACP (or at least its leadership) knows what it is best for the public good and selflessly strives to achieve those goals.

Conscience can be defined as the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the actions or thoughts of an individual or an inner sense impelling one toward right action.

Does Mr. Doherty believe that the ACP has acted in some way or ways that distinguish it from other medical professional groups  in regard to this alleged role as medicine's conscience?

What about pediatricians and their professional organization,the American Academy of Pediatricians, (AAP). If advocacy in regard to certain positions for various social issues is one criterion for being medicine's conscience,one could argue that the AAP has "out-advocated" ACP or at least earned a tie.Maybe ACP and AAP could be the co-conscience of medicine.

For example AAP has taken stands on measures to decrease firearms deaths,supported the Affordable Care Act,increased funding for the Children's health Insurance Program (CHIP) to name a few of their efforts.Since its founding  AAP has  advocated for the "health of all children", so ACP has no monopoly in putting "the patient first" and to claim that it is only internists that put patients first is without foundation and seems more like self serving rhetoric .

The American Psychiatric Association says its mission is in part to promote the highest quality care for individuals. That sounds like they put patients first too. The APA is more modest , however, in that their claim is that APA is the "voice and conscience of modern psychiatry".So maybe ACP should soften its claim and say they are the "conscience of medicine except for psychiatric issues".

In light of the most recent Newsweek revelation regarding executive pay and booking keeping practices and other alleged improprieties  at ABIM in regard to its maintenance of certification program (MOC), perhaps ACP could flex its conscience muscles and actually make a comment about ABIM's behavior.

It might also be in order to make a statement regarding ACP's educational products sold to internists that are promoted  as helpful for ABIM recertification.There are  numbers of internists out there who, rightly or wrongly,suspect there has been a very cozy and cahoots relationship between ABIM and ACP and their foundations with a revolving door type situation regarding the leadership ranks of those not for profit organizations . Surely, the voice of the conscience of  medicine should have something to say about that.

 Does advocacy for certain solutions to perceived social ills or problems constitute evidence for someone or something acting out of conscience?  It might but would it not be more correct to characterize ACP's advocacy for certain solutions as simply expressing views consistent with mainstream progressive thought which is in  some if not most  instances  contrary to mainstream conservative or libertarian thinking.While it may be possible that a majority of internists (I am not aware of a head count) consider themselves progressive, there are doubtlessly many libertarian and conservative internists who find ACP's views on a number of topics not an expression of their conscience.

Can a regular exercise program improve cardiac function in asymptomatic diastolic dysfunction with and without heart failure?

 Well ,at least one recent research paper answered that question in the affirmative.

 Dr. Nole and colleagues  (see below for reference) did a detailed study on the effects of endurance and resistance exercise on a small group of patients, some of who only had diastolic dysfunction (DD) and others who in addition had heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction.

 For purposes of the study normal diastolic function was defined as having: the following echocardiographic findings 1) E/A greater than one,2)E/e prime less than  10 and 3) preserved E/A greater than one during the valsalva maneuver.The E/A ratio is the ratio of early diastolic filling of the ventricle to the late filling (aka atrial kick).The E/e prime ratio is the ratio of velocity of early diastolic filling to the movement of the mitral value annulus as determined by tissue Doppler  and is thought to be a reasonable estimate of the pulmonary capillary pressure,but not under all conditions including Left bundle branch block.

 See here for the full text article.

Basically the exercise program which was mainly endurance training with some resistance exercise which was added later in the program lead to improvement in symptoms in those who were symptomatic and in indices of diastolic function as determined by cardiac echos.

Other studies have also demonstrated that exercise training can improve diastolic function.I have commented before about the effects of long time endurance exercise and the possible mitigation of age related diastolic dysfunction.

 The other site of improvement in exercise capacity resulting from an exercise program is improvement in the A-V 02 difference and several studies have indicated that it is that aspect of physiology that improves in HF patients who benefit from endurance exercise.This is the first paper I have seen that suggests that the heart  benefits as well.


.WNolte K., Schwarz S., Gelbrich G., Mensching S., Siegmund F., Wachter R., Hasenfuss G., Düngen H.-D., Herrmann-Lingen C., Halle M., Pieske B., and Edelmann F. (2014) Effects of long-term endurance and resistance training on diastolic function, exercise capacity, and quality of life in asymptomatic diastolic dysfunction vs. heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, ESC Heart Failure, 1, pages 59–74, doi: 10.1002/ehf2.12007




 

Summertime running in the south, quicker glygogen depletion and possible value of ice slurries

You don't have to be an exercise physiologists to know you cannot run as fast or as long in the summer.

One of the reasons long training runs don't work out as well is  glycogen depletion occurring sooner in hot weather. .This seems to be a fairly well demonstrated physiological fact.See here. Of course, volume depletion is a more dominant limiting factor.

 First, a brief taste of stylized "glycogenology". The classical 70 kilogram person of physiology textbook lore carries around about 100 grams of glycogen in the liver and about 500 grams in muscles.Liver glycogen can be broken down and released into the blood as glucose while muscle glycogen can only be directly used locally to fuel muscle action,getting ATP to the myosin heads.

After a 24 hour fast some 50-60% of liver glycogen is depleted to supply glucose for resting metabolic activities. Indirectly, muscle glycogen can function as a blood sugar source by producing lactate which can be transported to the liver and converted back to glucose (Cori Cycle).Glycogen depletion is a major factor in endurance exercise adventures and this can be mitigated a bit by glycogen loading,ingesting carbohydrates during the event,repleting liver glycogen before the event and by lots of training which hopefully shifts the fuel mix somewhat to fat utilization delaying the time of glycogen depletion.When that occurs you slow down appreciably as muscles fuled mainly by free fatty acids cannot contract as rapidly. 

 So, maybe if you can keep cooler you can delay glycogen depletion.

One thing  you can do to keep cooler seems to be to drink ice slurries.

I quote from an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports By authors Tan and Lee from the National University of Singapore.See here for abstract.

"The ingestion of ice slurry during exercise is a practical and an effective strategy that greatest the greatest heat sink because of the additional energy required to effect a phase change from solid ice to liquid water.A smaller volume of ice slurrry ( as compared with that of cold drinks is required to achieve similar reductions in body core temperature and improvements in endurance performance."

An earlier paper by J Dugas compared running times in the heat ingesting slurries with cold water and found his subjects could run further before exhaustion with the slurry. See here.

A similar study from Australia   by Siegel and co authors also showed a increase in running duration ( about 20%) in the heat when cold water ingestion was compared with ingestion of ice slurry.See here.

The ice slurry function as a Heat Sink, a concept well known to folks who fiddle around inside computers.The small ice particles have a high surface area to volume ratio which facilitates heat transfer.

If you like snow cones you might give it a try on a hot summer days. I find the  slurries refreshing and fun to eat whether my endurance is enhanced on not. 

The U.S. medical care boondoggle depends on hookwinking the physicians

The terms hoodwink and boondoggle are so appropriate. My comments here were inspired in large measure by Dr Michel Accad's Jan 2009 insightful  blog entry from which I quote:

'... beyond ignoring the obvious tension between the individual and the group,hoodwinking physicians into practicing "population medicine" is of course the essential  means to confuse practitioners into thoughtlessly carrying out sweeping intervention whose primary benefit is the profit of third parties."

 to this I add :  and the profit-not necessarily in monetary terms-of the academics whose writings give a scholarly veneer to this monumental hoodwinking enterprise.

See here for Dr. Accad's entire essay,

In this regard several terms and concepts are important:  population medicine, physicians as stewards of finite resources,cost  effectiveness research and  high value care. The key idea is to establish the notion that medical resources is a collectively owned resource and all are entitled to it by virtue of their existence. From this follows that the  utility of the aggregate matters and not that of the individual and that  some one has to manage this collectively owned resource and the elite medical progressives are the self nominated candidates for that job.

The medical  progressive's claim  to being egalitarian advocates of social justice is contradicted by their advocacy for a utilitarian approach to the allocation of these finite resources. Utilitarianism is not a subset of egalitarianism.A leading egalitarian, John Rawls accurately characterizes utilitarianism as being inattentive to the separateness of individuals and treating people merely as means for the achievement of some aggregate or social end. The medical progressives claim to promote social justice in the abstract but operationally sponsor utilitarian calculus in which some individuals may suffer to further  some alleged statistical benefit to the collective. The progressives play the social justice card frequently in their polemics profiting from this polymorphic notion's lack of generally agreed upon specificity - the term social justice is loose , vague and indeterminate.

The medical progressives causally dismiss the notion of rationing by their unilateral re-definition  which excludes the limiting of "low value" care from their universe  of rationing. Rationing according to this formulation means only limiting high value care and they presume they will be the arbiters of what value is high and what value is low. 


Another linguistic trap is to speak of a given medical expenditure as a "cost to the system" rather than an exchange.  So when someone goes to the ER with chest pain or severe headache that is considered to be a cost to the system or even more ridiculously a drain of resources rather than providing a service for a fee and the transfer of funds as part of various exchanges that are part of the ER medical encounters.

 When someone goes to a car repair shop to replace a radiator or visits a barber for a haircut why do we not speak of draining the car care industry's resources or depleting the finite hair care resources?It is because to a large degree we are paying for the medical care with someone else's money It is the third party payers and their academic facilitators that have accomplished a monumental hoodwinking of the public and most of the medical profession by distorting the language of medical care and shifted the emphasis from a long standing  oath based imperative to care for the patient to one of limiting care the effect of which is to benefit the third party payers

 The language of medicine has been transformed into the language of medical collectivism and the third party payers owe a large debt to the efforts of the collectivists in medical academia and to some of those individuals in influential leadership positions of certain professional medical associations.

In support of the claim that many physicians have been hoodwinked is the amazing amount of support  from professionals medical organizations for the passage of the so-called "doc-fix" or MACRA which mainly replaced one centrally planned system of price controls with another such system , one that placed even more control of medical care in the hands of federal planners and administrators and some "thought leaders" who have arisen from the leadership of various national medical organizations with important input from the lobbyists from the "Bigs" (big pharma,big hospital, big insurance,etc)


In closing I quote Dr. Accad again with this masterful summary:

" But beyond ignoring the obvious tension between the individual and the group, hoodwinking physicians into practicing “population medicine” is of course the essential means to confuse practitioners into thoughtlessly carrying out sweeping interventions whose primary benefit is the profit of third parties.  Only clever sophistry can claim to reconcile the needs of patients with the profit margin of insurance companies, the bottom line of hospital administrators, the end-of-the-month income of practitioners, the annual reports of employers, the promises of legislators, the zeal of government regulators, the self-importance of academics, the confused intentions of voters, and the pocketbooks of taxpayers.  The term “society” simply conceals the myriad of interest groups that partake in the boondoggle we call the health care system."

endurance exercise and the right ventricle-some thoughts

The issue of the effect(s) of endurance exercise on the right ventricle bothers me from time to time and I have blogged about it before.(see here)

A number of studies have shown that endurance exercise, marathons,triathlons, etc,  may result in transient changes in right ventricular function  (increased volume , decreased ejection fraction), while such changes in the left ventricle are typically not the case although some transient changes have been documented..But an important question is- do repeated episodes of prolonged exercise lead to some deleterious changes in the right  ventricle  which could include a predisposition to ventricular tachycardia or worse.Is there an exercise induced clinical picture of ARVD in someone who does not have the recognized genetic profile for ARVD?(see below).After thinking about it again and reading more about it,I think maybe but it does not seem to happen very often.

J. Ector and co workers studied right ventricular  (RV) function  in a group of  22 endurance athletes who had experienced episodes  of ventricular arrhythmias and concluded "Endurance athletes with arrhythmias have a high prevalence of right ventricular structural and/or arrhythmic involvement." ,the implication being the repeated endurance events predisposed to the rhythm problems (Eur Heart J. 2007, Feb 28 (3),345-53)

LaGerche studied 39 endurance athletes, see here, immediately after an endurance event,and one week later with echocardiography and Magnetic resonance Imaging. with gadolinium. Transient RV function changes noted immediately after  the event resolved by one week but 5/39 demonstrated  late deposition of gadolinium (delayed gadolenium enhancement or DGE) in the interventricular septum.The authors seemed to assume that the MR findings were fibrotic lesions and were causally related  to multiple bouts of endurance exercise but the actual cause of the late deposition of gadolinium has not been determined but it is true that  in some contexts ( maybe most) the histologic basis of the delayed gadolenium uptake is fibrosis.

Arrhymogenic right ventricular dysplasia (ARVD)-also called Arrhymogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy) is an inherited condition primarily involving the right ventricle with replacement of cardiac muscle with fibrous tissue and fat, leading to decreased  right ventricular function and predisposition to arrhythmias including ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation.. Typically it is inherited as an autosomal dominant and involves several mutations in the genes that code for the desomsomal adhesive proteins which function to help bind muscle cells together.

ARVC is much more common in Italy and naturally there is more awareness in Italy and more more published research. The most common cause of sudden cardiac  death in the young in Italy is ARVC accounting for 22% of deaths versus 7 % from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) in contrast to  HCM being the most common congenital problem found in sudden deaths in young athletes in the United states.See here for details of the long standing cardiac screening program in Italy.

While it seem reasonable to conjecture that a person with one of the ARVD gene patterns might hasten the clinical manifestations of ARVD by endurance exercise , is it possible/likely that a person could bring about an  ARVD-like clinical picture by repeated endurance training and endurance events in the absence of the Italian or other recognized  genetic patterns ?

Earlier work in 2009  by Breuckmann et al ( see here ) also demonstrated some marathoners with delayed gadolenium enhancement (DGE) but in a different distribution that seen in LaGerche's subjects. Of 102 marathon runners age 50-72 who had run at least five marathons in the preceding 3 years,12 showed a DGE .Of those, 5 had a "coronary artery disease" pattern along the distribution of the left anterior descending coronary artery while 7 showed a "predominantly midmyocardial patchy pattern".Could these midmyocardial patches of presumed fibrosis be the earliest lesions of a endurance athlete's cardiomyopathy, which to my knowledge, except for arguably ARVC , has not been reported. Have autopsies been done on Tarahumara runners?

Standard maximal heart rate prediction formula may result in an underestimate

For stress tests purposes ( regular treadmill and nuclear exercise imaging) physicians  typically use the formula : Maximal heart rate =220-age.

Another formula is the Tanaka formula; Maximal heart rate =209-.7age

More recently based on a Norwegian study by Nes  and co workers the following formula is suggested :

Maximal heart rate= 211-.64 with an error term of +/- 10.8. See here for reference.

For the three formulas applied to a 75 year old we get maximal heart rate predictions of
145,156 and 163 . (Standard,Tanaka,Nes)

Frequently stress tests are terminated at when the patient reaches 85% of the predicted max heart rate.
For the three formula we get :

123
132
138.

The validity of a stress tests depends in part on having the patient exercise to a high enough level to induce some degree of stress into the stress tests and use of 220-age formula would seem to make  false negative tests more likely.This is not breaking news, Tanaka said as much in his 2001 article in the American College of Cardiology Journal  but still some  stress test facilities still use the 220 formula . See here.

Do we neeed to worry about the right ventricle in endurance exercise?

Is the right ventricle the Achilles heel of endurance exercise? I wrote briefly about this subject in 2007 .

In that regard there is more data now about which to fret.  A 2011 article by researchers in Australia and Belgium  gives reason to believe that endurance exercise affects the left and right ventricles differently and possibly  not in a good way .Could endurance exercise induce chronic changes in the structure of the right ventricle such that it is vulnerable to ventricular arrhythmias, similar to those related to an inherited cardiomyopathy (arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy).  See here. ARVC is very uncommon in the US but more commonly seen in Europe particularly in Italy where it is said to be the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes.

 The authors studied 40 well trained endurance athletes before an event , immediately afterwards and 6-11 days later.Echocardiograms were done at all three times and cardiac MRs were done at baseline. 

 Immediately post race, right ventricular ejection fraction was reduced  and RV volume was increased while comparable   changes were not present in the left ventricle. RV function did recover by one week except for an echo derived index  called "global strain".(In echo lingo strain means deformation which can be determined by tissue Doppler techniques)

Five of the 39 athletes demonstrated delayed gadolinium enhancement (DGE) in the ventricular septum. These changes believed to represent fibrosis were more common in the athletes who had  been competitive endurance athletes longer  and the authors suggested that the areas of  fibrosis noted on the gadolinium scan were in the area of the septum which bulges into the left ventricle as a result of the tissue deformation noted  in the right ventricle.


As the authors stated, the long-term clinical significance warrants further study.Will there be re-modelling of the RV in such a way as to predispose to ventricular arrhythmias?

Another publication by some of the same authors  had previously examined the prevalence of gene mutations in athletes with complex ventricular arrhythmias. Specifically they looked for desmosomal gene mutations of the type typical of ARVC ( Arrhythmogenic  Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy). Desmosomes are complexes of protein that function to facilitate cell to cell adhesion. In 20 of the 47 cases no desmosome gene mutations was identified.A suggestion was made that prolonged endurance exercise could bring about remodeling of the right ventricle which would predispose to ventricular arrhythmias  even in some athletes who do not have the recognized desmosomal gene mutation..I wrote in more detail about this study here.

The right ventricular issue may well be worth worrying a bit about but the small but consistently  increased incidence of atrial fibrillation in long term exercisers has a more robust data base in its support. 

Is the doc-fix bill worse than SGR?

Here is what Dr. Scott Gottlieb has to say in his Forbes column on 3/19/15:

"The current Medicare reforms being put before Congress ( he was writing before the bill was passed) are better than the existing scheme, the so-called sustainable growth rate or SGR. But the new measures sill envisions Medicare actuaries and  at the center of a price setting process. Now they will also have the authority to mandate clinical practice standards. That this woeful development stands as an improvement to the status quo is a measure of how much our current approach has corroded so many aspects of medical care."

That is I believe the worse and most important part of MACRA. The folks at Medicare will mandate clinical practice standards that it turn will drive physicians compensation.Some well intentioned physicians working within various medical societies sincerely believe they can inject rationality into those yet to be written standards.Those well intentioned few are up against the lobbying powers of the various crony capitalists,the bureaucratic inertia of the administrative state, and the bully pulpit power of a subset of the leadership of professional organizations who either sincerely or cynically advocate for the purportedly calculable  good of the collective over the individual patient.

Yes, of course it is good that physicians no longer have the threat of a 21% immediate reduction in fees and to receive a slight increase (less than the rate of inflation) but after you look past that the slight and temporary  gains made now will seem like a Pyrrhic victory and I believe that Dr. Gottlieb may have been overly optimistic in his comments.

One of the reasons allegedly for the widespread support of MACRA was  that the impending 21% cut would force many physicians to opt out of Medicare. I submit that once the Merit Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) is implemented and understood by practicing physicians it will be likely that even more physicians will leave Medicare.

Will well meaning  physicians somehow find the time,money and energy to fix the heretofore inadequate or harmful quality measures replacing them with better ones?  Will the CMS quality "metrics" some how escape  the inescapable  reach of Goodhart's law?  A measure of something looses its value as a measure when it become a target. With quality measures as will be defined by CMS and resource utilization embedded into MICRA  more and more medical decisions will be made in Washington and physicians will be less and less able to act as the fiduciary agents of their patients with trust in physicians and reliance on evidence based medicine fading away.

For a detailed and frightening analysis of what MACRA contains please read this commentary by Dr. Arvind Cavale. See here.

There is so much to fret about that is explained by Dr. Cavale  not the least of which is the move to have your physician share the insurance risk with the insurance company. Have a nice day.

The Doc Fix, prayers of the progressive medical elite have been answered and then some

In regards to the passage of the doc fix bill (known now by the acronym MACRA) John Goodwin said it well: " it locks in Obamacare's vision of the relationship between physicians and the state." ... Now, doctors and patients will have to get used to a new reality where the federal government and beltway lobbyists’ priorities are more deeply embedded in physicians’ offices than ever."

Further the exact details and degree of the embedding will not be made known  until  phase three of new payments system. Remember we have to pass the bill to see what is in it?

The changes made in physicians payments are in three phases and from the years 2015 -2020 there will be a 0.5% increase in physician CMS fees and from 2020 -2026 the increase will be zero.

Phase 1 is the "lull-docs-to-sleep" phase in which all physicians will "enjoy"  increases in the payment schedule  (that do not keep pace with inflation) and for a while not worry about the always impending threat of a SGR imposed fee cut. This is the deal that is too- good- to -pass-up phase which typically  occurs in the early stages of a scam.This phase runs from 2015 to 2019.Docs who are part of an APM )(see below) will receive an extra 5%.

Phase 2 is what I call the the devil is in the details phase.Physicians will be reimbursed based on a formula that takes into account  four buzz word filled metrics.The categories of metrics are 1)quality 2)resource utilization 3)meaningful use of electronic health record. 4) clinical practice improvements. This phase runs from 2019 through 2025 and the overarching   buzz word  is MIPS (Merit based incentive payment system).
 CMS will play the major role is setting physician payment.Note the meaningful use requirement will likely have more teeth and there is reason to believe that the much reviled MOC has received more statutory authority,although there are conflicting claims as to whether MOC is explicitly in Doc Fix or if it was already part of ACA or not in either.The National Quality Forum (NQF) is contracted by CMS for three years to provide advice and make suggestions regarding quality issues.It should not go unnoticed that the CEO of the NQF is the same Christine Cassel who was CEO of ABIM during the time that MOC was implemented and the Choosing Wisely Campaign was launched.

Whoever the rule makers will be will be targeted by lobbyists stake holders to try and mold the rules to suit their particular concern.

Phase 3 is the everyone-work- for- the-man final phase  in which physician pay will be dictated by their involvement in a "alternative payment model", examples of which would be an ACO or a medical home or some sort of scheme involving large vertically integrated health behemoths.This phase begins in 2026.

Medical decisions will be shifted even more than they are  now to Washington and the wishes of Don Berwick and Troyen Brennan that they expressed in their book  New Rules are much closer to being realized. I quote from their writing:

"Today, this isolated relationship[ he is speaking of the physician patient relationship] 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 Doc Fix also moves forward the recommendation of Dr. Robert Berenson that he and a co-author made in a 1998 Annals of Internal Medicine Article ( p 395-402):


"We propose that devotion to the best interests of each individual be replaced with an ethic of devotion to the best interests of the group for which the physician is personally responsible."

MACRA will go a long way to achieving that proposal.

After 18 years and randomized trials with 25,000 men ,the relationship between 5 ARs and prostate cancer is still ??

This commentary from JAMA give a good summary of where we are with 5 ARs ( Five alpha reductase inhibitors) and prostate cancers.Large randomized clinical trials (PCPT trial and the REDUCE trial have been done with  finasteride (Proscar) and dutasteride (Avodart).

My take is that  the 5 ARs seem to reduce the risk of developing low grade prostate cancer but may increase the risk of higher grade prostate cancer. However, a reasonable argument can be made that the 5 ARs do not in fact increase the risk of high grade cancer but just make the cancers more easily detectable but we probably will never know because is is unlikely that many further studies will be done and  I doubt further analysis of existing data will be convincing.

One can also argue that a 5 AR driven decrease in the occurrence of low grade prostate cancer may not translate into fewer prostate cancer deaths. Most every diagnostic or therapeutic  decision involves a tradeoff, but here exactly what the tradeoff here is remains unclear.The drugs clearly decrease prostate size but in regard to prostate cancer there is much lingering doubt.

As hard as answers are to come by in preventive medicine issues ( think the changing panorama of suggestions for healthy diets and aspirin use, glucose control in diabetics, etc), it is astounding that the population medicine folks think that they can discern what preventive measures "should" be done and would be willing to recommend  that some should have to forgo treatment  so some in the future would be the beneficiary of some greater aggregate good. See here for Dr. Harold Sox's plan for just that policy.Hubris-city.

 I used to spend considerable time giving preventive medicine advice in the context of a corporate wellness program. As I think back on what I said then ( with more certainty that the data warranted ) I have more than a few doubts now about what I said then. The only thing I am more sure about now is that for the most part regular exercise is a good thing. I am much less sure about the advice I gave about aspirin and statins for primary coronary disease prevention and for PSA screening and screening for bone density. It may well be that randomized clinical trials are the best we can do in terms of discerning medical management plans but it not uncommon to finalize RCTs  and still the answer(s) remain undetermined as is the case of the reductase inhibitors.

The old plaintiff lawyer meme of "Doctor, were you wrong then or are  you wrong now" continues to hit home, particularly in the enterprise of preventive medicine.

The medical progressive's fear-that someone,somewhere is deciding with his physician's input what his health care should be

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as that haunting fear that someone,somewhere may be happy.

The Medical Progressive Elite's haunting fear is that someone,somewhere is making their own medical decisions with input from their private physician.This fear is shared by the third party payers. In recent years,there appears to be considerable progress in alleviating their fear.

The last thing that the third party payers and the medical progressive elite want is that medical decisions be made  a physician- patient "dyad".This situation is ripe for a classic Baptists and Bootleggers scenario,the medical elite sincerely believing that medicine is too complex and expensive to be left to the judgment of patients with advice from their physicians and the third party payers striving to decrease the cost of doing business and increasing profits share holder value.

This medicine-is-too important-to-be left-patients-and-their- physicians view  is made crystal clear in the following quote from the book,"New Rules"  written by Drs. Don Berwick and Troyen Brennan:

"Today, this isolated relationship[ they are speaking of the physician patient relationship] 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."


Dr.Berwick went on the be the  head of CMS for a while and Dr. Brennan went on to be the chief medical office of Aetna insurance company and then CVS Caremark.Sometimes the line between the Baptists and the Bootleggers gets a bit blurry.

Destroying the physician patient dyad or relationship  has been a strategic goal of the progressive elite for years and a major initiative to that end was the 2002 publication "Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium:A physician charter".That was a joint effort by the ACP Foundation,the ABIM Foundation and the European Federation of Internal Medicine. The project chair was Troy Brennan and, in my opinion, importantly in terms of future funding and  promotion of the "charter" a member of the project was  Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.The RWJF has been a major source of funds for the ad campaign for the Professionalism project.  She has been the CEO and President of the RWJF since 2002. Dr. Harry Kimball ,president of ABIM from 1991 to 2003 was also a project participant.

The Professionalism 's theme is to downplay the fiduciary role of the physician to the patient and insert a nebulous co-duty of  the physician to be a steward of society's limited medical resources and to work for social justice. A particular political agenda was inserted into medical ethics. For physicians who wondered how that role was to be played out, later the ABIMF clarified  things by explaining that one could be a steward of the [collectively owned] medical resources  and social justice would be achieved by providing efficient health care.In one document the authors changed the nature of traditional medical ethics and  also rewrote the meaning of social justice which was now efficient care as opposed to the widely accepted meaning of social justice as redistribution.  In a bait and switch move they have redefined social justice as efficient health care attempting to aggregate the values that individuals might place on a treatment with some collective metric allegedly representing the greatest good to the greatest number.They then further simplified things for the practicing internists (actually all physicians) by gratuitously asserting that following guidelines would be the road to social justice.

Disappointingly, the AMA went along with this flim flam sophistry of the physicians as stewards of society's collectively owned medical resources.See here.

In the ACP-ABIM world no longer would the patient and the physician  be the primary determiners of a test or treatment value but value would be designated as high or low  primarily on a cost effectiveness calculus.Rather than treating each patient as an independent moral agent an aggregate utilitarian metric would be imposed  in which "high value care" is not in the eye of the patient but rather defined by a third party and expressed in  quality adjusted life years per dollar spent The only or at least determinate value is economic efficiency.

Of course, the medical professional elite is a subset of the larger progressive community whose operational credo is that most things are too complex and complicated  to be left to average people and if they will not listen to the delivered wisdom they should be compelled  while the progressive's polar star and major talking point is  to fight against inequality. The poster child for the stick approach has be the comments of Dr. Robert Benson Jr.,the emeritus president of ABIMF,writing on the blog of the ABIMF:

" CMS, which has the ultimate negotiating position in the form of reimbursement for Medicare services, could only accept negotiated bundled charges. It could also refuse payment for non-compliance with the Choosing Wisely recommendations."...ABIM could require candidates to achieve a perfect score on questions related to costs and redundant care as a requirement for admission to secure exams for initial certification or MOC." (This would seem to be a rather severe penalty for not complying with a "recommendation" which Benson thinks should be an edict.)

Consider how important the Choosing Wisely rules would be if  Benson's wishes were enacted.Consider how much of a target the Choosing Wisely decisions would be to various lobbying groups.Third party payers would relish such a situation.


If you want to know what the ABIM and its foundation are about, just read  the ABIMF blog.

The combination of mega hubris and libido domini spells trouble in health care as it does pretty much everywhere.


minor spelling and punctuation corrections made on 3/31/15 and 4/21/16