Junk Science on Hospital Acquired Infections

As a part of an elitist motivated strategy to denigrate American Doctors, Nurses and Hospitals, let’s get together and do some junk science studies sponsored by the company that brings you–Obamacare.

You may recall that I have alerted you to elements to the strategy to install single payer government control of medicine.
1. Work up a class war about rich doctors and hospitals feeding off the misery of the little people–right out of the Commie Manifesto. Every body gets to join in, unions, corporations, attorneys, social scientists, advocacy groups, consumer protection and grievance organizations and agencies, commentators from both sides, politicians, chattering class mavens.
Demands are made to develop a caring, competent, intelligent and effective, affordable healthcare system with changes that will work.
Dunn’s answer here:
misguided healthcare policy
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/the_myths_of_managing_healthca.html
2. Do studies that show financial misconduct, fraud in big government payment programs victimized by rich and greedy people. Imply that such thievery is also part of the game played by the evil insurance companies as well as the providers.
3. Show the failure of the American Healthcare system to measure up to international standards, like maybe a WHO study that promotes socialist single payer systems as best.
Scott Atlas’ analysis and response here:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-worst-study-ever/
4. Assert that in spite of the expense and the rich and greedy hospitals, docs and nurses, the system is unsafe–killing 44 to 98 thousand people a year (To Err is Human Institute of Medicine 2000) based on a study with questionable methodology and conclusions as admitted by the lead author. Then a few years later, with no real justification, start announcing that new studies say 400,000 people are dying from doc and nurse negligence every year, nearly as many as the number who die from cancer. Safety experts advise it is a crisis that requires their expert interventions.
http://junksciencearchive2.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/tex-med-2000-with-tables.doc
http://junksciencearchive2.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/acsh-pat-safety-art-2005.doc
http://junkscience.com/2014/03/03/patient-safety-junk-research/
Discussion of 400,000 negligent patient deaths from a meta-analysis (read data dredge junk science) study by a bereaved NASA scientist turned patient safety expert, John James, whose son died of a heart problem.
Dr. James is now a declared patient safety experts and is published in the Journal of Patient Safety. He uses a new tool called the global trigger and analyzed 4 studies done by others. purely a data manipulation meta-analysis.
He can get published in a patient safety journal because that’s what they do, sure he can:
http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/09000/A_New,_Evidence_based_Estimate_of_Patient_Harms.2.aspx#
http://whyisamericanhealthcaresoexpensive.blogspot.com/2013/10/medical-errors-new-study-by-john-t.html
My response to Dr. James:
http://junkscience.com/2014/03/30/junk-science-patient-safety-research-by-nasa-scientist/
I would remind him that a real patient safety researcher, Troyen Brennan admitted the patient safety studies are unreliable.
I’d say so, Dr. Brennan, with a kappa on 2 physician judgments of negligence of 0.4?
With a rate of negligence in death cases well about 50 percent–and an admission that many of the death cases were patients who were terminally ill.
With a follow-up study in Utah Colorado that showed a much lower projected deaths from negligence and a methodology change to eliminate disagreements on negligence. Two physicians did the judgements on negligence in concert, one, Dr. Brennan–the big boy of the Harvard safety group, and Dr. Thomas, a fellow–how often would one imagine a disagreement between the two, and the paper admitted they made an agreed decision.
Finally, in three different major studies on patient safety CA by Mills in 77, NY by Brennan for 84 and Utah/Colorado in 1900 there was no difference in incidents 4% or negligence–less than 0.25%. If anything the Utah Colorado 2000 study projected deaths from negligence down from the 44-98 thousand deaths projected by 1984 NY.
5. Then start the drumbeat about nosocomial (hospital acquired) infections being caused by lack of hand washing and bugs in hospitals that were there because of incompetent, rich, greedy, and negligent players mentioned before (see no. 1-4) careless negligent and evil failure to wash their hands enough.
And of course it all makes sense if you want control–prove up the inability of the private sector to get along without elite statist guidance and directions. Prove that the government that brought you the Post Office and other bureaucracies is the only entity competent to control the most important and significant sector of the economy that affects human welfare.
http://ohsonline.com/articles/2014/03/28/200-hai-deaths-daily.aspx?admgarea=news
On this hospital acquired infections issue, a brief answer, from a physician/inactive attorney risk manager and hospital consultant, appointed by two governors to serve on an advisory committee on provider quality to a Legislature created Council on Healthcare.
1. People in hospitals are not sterile, nor are their visitors, care givers or the support staff of the hospital.
2. Culture any corner of the hospital except maybe operating rooms and you certainly might find bugs.
3. When sick patients get invasive procedures and tubes for feeding and breathing those tubes are immediately not sterile to some degree and the ports and catheters to a bacterium are like interstate 80.
4. The hand washing campaign is just an easy way to blame somebody. However one could as easily blame noses or armpits or clothes or kids, or visitors or the nature of the world, which is not sterile. But political agit prop campaigns are energized by finding an easy villain.
If I put a central line in your internal and big veins with sterile technique it stays cleaner and reduces chance of infection, same is true of antibiotic embedded or chemically resistant bladder of vein catheters. A guy from Johns Hopkins has made a career of promoting sterile insertions of central lines, but I would suspect his studies are poisoned by the Hawthorne effect.
If you be sick with tubes in your body, I can reduce your chance of infections from those tubes. However it really isn’t surprising that sick people who die are found to have developed infections that were acquired during their hospitalization because in end stages, the desperate body is easy pickins for the heartless bacteria and million if not billions of bacteria live in all of us today, some nice guys, some not so nice.
However if rich and greedy, negligent and incompetent hospitals, docs and nurses are to blame for any problems, that justifies remediation and who you gonna call?–why of course the government.
Apparatchiks must step in, smart asses with clipboards and a worried look on their face, criticism in their to-do list must be in charge.
Last time I checked I don’t work with incompetent or negligent or uncaring physicians and nurses in hospitals that don’t care about anything but money–that’s the narrative for statist, and professional elitist critics who usually don’t work weekends and holidays and, if asked, would say that well-meaning know it all mandarins from the government are good, that capitalist free marketeers are heartless thieves and murderers.
Remember the Alinsky rules–take down the enemy, attack, attack. freeze em with epithets and calumny–never let up. Destroy.
In fact one of the benefits gratuitously received by the critics is the work of academic health sciences scholars who could see the safety crusade as an annuity. Academics like finding fault and avoiding making healthcare decisions. It’s easy work for chatterers to do Monday morning stuff.