I just think he could do without the cheap tricks.
Davis is combative towards the Med industry because he caught so much flack from them for so many years. In any older article about the rise of Heart Scanning, you will find a description of the dislike for the EBT machine coming about because of its marketing.
The small company who invented and sold it had a lot of opposition from the big Scanners like GE because it was so cheap. Two mil for the machine, and screen for $250. No money for the Hospitals or referral fees to "fee for service" Doctors in that!
So they sold it to "Scanner Centers" as a new way to get customers, and boy, did the Doctors hate that! That article you posted quoted the AHA statement from 2000 on the procedure where they damned it with faint praise. The AHA finally ate crow and admitted it was a good procedure in, I believe, 2006. But one of the Doctors involved in the statement still made sure the new statement was weasel-worded.
Davis has posted to me that they have Emailed back and forth with the Doctor that has the article posted at "About.com" that you linked, and that he now is mainly in agreement with them. But the misinformation is still up there.
The last word I have is that GE finally got so sick of the competition with their CT scanners and MRI machines that they bought the little company and closed down the manufacture of EBT machines. Lots of the machines are out there and working fine. Plus, a 16 slice CT or better can do a heart scan. Just more expensive way to go.
GE's big push now is there 64 slice scanner to do coronary plaque scanning. It does a "Virtual" Coronary Angiogram. It's invasive, uses high X-rays, and just adds another procedure in front of the Cath lab. If it detects a blockage, you still go on for a Cath, Angio, and stent procedure. The procedure can't give you a plaque scoring. Hopefully they will come up with the software for it to do that in the future. Then it would be superior to an EBT. But it's not there yet. However, the machine can be used to give you the same heart scan as the EBT. If I get Kaiser to do it for me, that's what they will use. If not, I will have to use an outside Scan Center to get a score and track my plaque. |
