medical (Page 2)

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, about half a million Americans traveled overseas last year to have surgery that costs two to three times more in the US. The ironic name for this is “medical tourism.”

In News Target, Jessica Fraser gives an example of this: a 60-year-old Oklahoma woman went to India to have hip surgery that cost around $7,000. The same operation would have clost $40,000 here in the US. With her hotel and airfare, the total cost was $12,000?still less than one-third what it would have cost here in the States. India has many physicians who have trained in the US or the UK. Americans can now even purchase special health insurance that will send them to foreign countries for needed surgery.
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Newswise – We’ve recently read scandalous stories about how the CIAfarms out torture by returning detainees to countries thatdo not hesitate to use these methods in order to obtaininformation. Now it’s been announced that the FDA hasdecided that the widely accepted code of ethics used fordrug trials on patients is not necessary for studiesconducted abroad. Poor U.S. citizens don’t fare anybetter?Bill Moyers reports that the U.S. government has paidblack families to spray pesticides in their homes so the FDAcan measure the results, even though it’s known that theseinsecticides can be toxic to children.
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Donald Church was left in agony for more than two months when surgeons sewed him up after an operation and left a metal tool over a foot long inside him. When he complained that he couldn?t bend over, doctors told him this was to be expected after major surgery. He even set off metal detectors in airports. The University of Washington Medical Center has now paid him almost $100,000.

His first operation was in May 2000, to remove a 13 pound malignant abdominal tumor. The normal surgical practice is to count up the instruments used before closing the patient up, to make sure nothing is left inside the body. However, in this case, a foot-long malleable retractor, which is used to hold a wound open so that surgeons can reach inside it, was somehow overlooked.
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