Useless treatments
The report that more than one thousands of medical treatments are actually useless is quite an eye opener, as is the report that the cost of healthcare in the Netherlands has shot up by 40 percent over the past ten years.
What happens in the Netherlands does not necessarily stay there, so we figure that in our mini-medical world of St. Maarten the same things occur. It makes sense to put medical treatments under the microscope and to separate the useful from the useless ones.
Why is this a good idea? Because giving people useless treatments does not make any sense to begin with and secondly, it is costing the community a fortune.
Here is the kicker: not everybody agrees about what is useless. You only have to look at the world of alternative medicine to understand this. There are treatments out there that people would give their left arm for while the same treatment is looked upon with disdain in the circles of what we tend to call regular medicine.
The medical profession has evolved over the decades and new technologies have made all kinds of treatments possible that did not even exist fifty years ago.
The principle of the sky is the limit has somehow gotten the medical profession in a chokehold. If something is possible, then, by all means, it has to be done. What can be done should be done.
That is obviously an iffy terrain. Not for nothing has the medical world come under scrutiny for ballooning costs. Insurance premiums in the Netherlands are going up steeply next year and apparently there is nobody able to do something about it.
We once understood that it is impossible to change anything in the medical worlds because there are so many parties with so many different interest involved.
There is also the thing of the patient: who is going to tell a citizen with an extremely rare disease that he will not be treated for it because it is too expensive? Politically that potato is too hot to handle.
Yet, we will all one day pass through that door from which there is no return and if healthcare costs are going really through the roof, somebody will have to take some tough decisions.
The listing of more than one thousand rather useless treatments is a good beginning. If we can weed those out of our system, the resources will become available for that patient with that rare disease. But if we stick our heads in the sand and refuse to look at this issue, the whole healthcare system is bound to come crashing down one of these days. And then what?
