• TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    The amount of unnecessary surgeries has been a known issue since the 1950s. During the first year of the pandemic, when the amount of non-critical surgeries would have been at a local minima, there were about 100,000 unnecessary surgeries. Spine surgeries came in at about 30,000.

    In this article they reference a survey of why surgeons were doing unnecessary spine surgeries:

    The two common answers were: USS were done because “we always have done this way” and for “financial gain, renown, or both”.

    The article goes on and makes some recommendations. The first of which is:

    1.Setting up musculoskeletal clinics in primary healthcare centers to filter spine cases and prevent direct access to spine surgeons.

    We continue to undertrain physicians for the US population and many are incentives to go into lucrative specialties leaving primary care physicians to be over booked, and buried in paper work.