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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (534450)	12/5/2009 10:16:24 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577814

And I suggest you look at the entire medical system.... firstthings.com and-canada/ A point is also made as to how our deaths are reported, ie death certificate. It is pointed out that many of our DC's do not identify cancer as cause of death.. I don't know why but my brother died 2 years ago after a 4 year fight with colon cancer........the DC says cause of death was "respiratory failure" The following is from the discussion of the paper.... "Unfortunately attempts to prove survival rates from cancers are higher in the United States leave a great deal to be desired. What is measured in the United States is those who are treated. It leaves out huge numbers of those who are not treated, because they lack health insurance or had their insurance cut off while they were being treated. The statistics in the U.S. only cover those who received treatment, not those who did not. Another glaring difference in the U.S. Statistics is that the European statistics count everyone who has had cancer, who has been treated for cancer and gets a survival rate. In the United States, the major study that is being used to get these rates that conservatives who oppose insurance reform are using, itself admits that the U.S. survival rates may be greatly inflated by the methods used to get the figure. The problem with the American statistics is that they use cancer registries which only include a small percentage of those who actually get cancer and are treated for it and then they mathematically extrapolate a rate for the entire U.S. population from registries that only keep track of a few percent of people who are being treated and survive or do not. In Great Britain their cancer registries include 100 percent of the population for every illness measured. There is significant evidence that when the same methods that are used in the United States are used in Great Britain or anyplace else that has some form of Universal Health Care, that they get better survival rates than the United States does. Even if more appropriate comparisons were made, these sound bites misrepresent the statistical analysis, and give a false impression of dramatic differences where there may be none. The CONCORD Study (1) found that the UK had lower survival rates. Below are some of the top countries, and England (the UK was divided into England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but all their results are similar, so England is used for simplicity). Five year relative breast cancer survival rates from CONCORD study. Rank….Country….mean (95% confidence interval) 1……….Cuba……….84.0 (82.9, 85.2) 2……….US………….83.9 (83.7, 84.1) 3……….Canada……82.5 (81.9, 83.0) 4………Sweden……82.0 (81.2, 82.7) 5………Japan……….81.6 (79.5, 83.5) 6………Australia.. ..80.7 (80.1, 81.3) 8………France……..79.8 (78.2, 81.4) 22…….England……69.8 (69.5, 70.2) irst thing to note here is that the differences between the top countries are very small. The CONCORD study report warns that the ranking of the countries maybe unstable. There are differences between these countries that cannot be controlled for, and aspects of statistical analysis that are imprecise. While the CONCORD study defends its methods and says that the resulting biases are small, it also warns that when the differences between countries are small, then a small bias might make a big difference in the ranking. So, the bottom line is that from these data and the warnings provided by the study itself, we do not really know whether Cuba, the US, Canada, Sweden or Japan is ‘the best’ at treating breast cancer. This is pretty much the case in all these attempts to measure survival rates for all cancers. Every one of the countries being compared provides its own statistics for the analysis. Every single country counts these survival rates using different methods, but the United States uses the worse method possible. It takes a very small sample of cancer sufferers (two or three percent of them) and then simply extrapolates across the entire population. The Brits use the best system. They count everyone who has gotten a cancer and has been treated. In the United States there are huge amounts of flaws in how anything is counted when it comes to medicine. There are many people who die of relatively simple to treat conditions, and when they drop dead of a heart attack, the death certificate reads “Died of Heart Attack” and not “Died of a Heart Attack because the patient had not seen a`doctor for ten years because they did not have health insurance for ten years” Then there are the deaths that occur in hospitals that are treated as deaths due to medical error. The fact that the patient had cancer and was given an incorrect treatment does not go into those statistics of cancer survival rates. They go into the log of deaths caused by “Medical Error”