There They Go Again - the New England Medical Journal Publishes another Rant, this Time about Power Morcellation

In 2015, we noted (here and here) that the New England Journal of Medicine seemed to have been reduced to publishing rants about "pharmascolds" who are paranoid about conflicts of interest. Now there they go again.... BackgroundThe sad story about the risks of power morcellation for the treatment of fibroids has received considerable media attention.  The state of play through July, 2014 was described in a series of articles in the Cancer Letter of July 4, 2014. (Look here.) Uterine fibroids are a common affliction of women.  Their preferred surgical management had changed from open surgery to minimally invasive surgery, sometimes robotically performed, and often incorporating a device called a power morcellator to pulverize the fibroids, allowing the use of small incision.  However, after a patient at the Brigham and Womens' Hospital (BWH) in Boston, part of the Partners Healthcare system, was found to have disseminated sarcoma post power morcellation, most likely because the machine spread tumor cells throughout her abdomen, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an advisory against using the procedure morcellation, and despite some controversy, the procedure is now uncommonly used.The patient so severely affected was Dr Amy Reed, an anesthesiologist at the BWH.  Her husband, a cardiothoracic surgeon at BWH, launched a campaign to reduce the use of power morcellation.  His pursuit of this campaign underlined an important part of the histor...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: cancer FDA logical fallacies New England Journal of Medicine Partners Healthcare Source Type: blogs