Vindicated scientist demonstrated surgery alternatives for stroke victims
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"Major improvements can simply be made by medical – as opposed to procedural – interventions, such as the adoption of healthier lifestyles, anti-cholesterol drugs, taking blood pressure [drugs] and cutting out smoking.”
How are these "surgery alternatives" if the underlying cause is usually years of lifestyle choices? Is the doctor expected to tell patients to lose weight and quit smoking, and send them home? So much of medicine has this conundrum. Patients don't simply change as expected and they will also seek out treatment if none is offered otherwise.
Medicine is absolutely capable of demanding patients work diligently towards lifestyle changes before they receive surgical intervention. For example, if you want an organ transplant and you aren’t working diligently towards health (often with exactly the same list of lifestyle changes as above!) you may be denied your organ transplant.
The problem she fought against was that surgeons didn’t want to consider that the lifestyle changes method could possibly be effective. She was right; they were wrong.
So now it’s left to medicine to decide when and how to take that into account in their treatment recommendations and standards of care. As you describe, this is a Hard Problem, but it’s a familiar one. They already have lots of experience with treatment through lifestyle change, and now as a result of her work, they can apply those learning to this new area too.
Good work.
He tells some really interesting stories about being a surgeon in iraq and then his surgical practice in the United States. Being a man who values results, he began to recommend lifestyle and diet changes to his Patients, finding that sometimes it even made surgery unnecessary. And according to him this upset the hospital. He went on to explain the surgeries are very profitable for hospitals and that because of this they are over-prescribed. People are having unnecessary surgery all the time.
Ever since then I have been keeping my eye out for further evidence if this is true or not. It strikes me as plausible.