degree of accountability. Without a far greater level of regulation, there is no way to hold physicians accountable for errors. Errors may be humans, but someone needs very often to provide lifelong care for the disabled human who results. (There are definitely cases where in fact, the physician made a justifiable decision and the jury decided against the physician wrongly. We should address these sorts of problems, but the way one addresses them is not to take away the ability to hold physicians accountable through lawsuits.)
Many believe there is a great deal of regulation in medicine - but really, that's not the case.
I'm amazed by the number of physicians who prescribe drugs for completely off-label usage, without any scientific evidence to back them up. There are physicians who prescribe a concoction of FDA approved drugs and openly argue that the concoction will destroy fat tissue. In the Schiavo case, we had physicians who felt they could diagnose her via ESP.
There are plenty of idiotic physicians out there. They need much more regulation. They also need far more continuing education requirements.
Physicians Assistants have to retake their boards every 6 years. Why shouldn't physicians be held to the same standard, made to review what they are supposed to know?
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http://www.network-lipolysis.com/index.php?id=692“The doctors doing this are driving ahead of their headlights,” said Los Angeles plastic surgeon Brian Kinney, immediate past president of the Plastic Surgery Educational Foundation of the United States and clinical assistant professor of plastic surgery at USC. “They are practicing way outside the bounds of science, which is why some of us are uncomfortable. There’s a lot we don’t know about these chemicals, including how they affect nerves, tissue and blood vessels. We don’t know what happens to the fat once it’s dissolved, whether it enters the bloodstream or the lymphatic system.”
Terry Dubrow, a board-certified plastic surgeon and medical director for the Costa Mesa Fig center, said the fat doesn’t wind up in the bloodstream, that it and the drug are excreted through “normal metabolic pathways.”
Richard D’Amico, assistant clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and president of the ASPS, agrees with Kinney. “This is another example of hype and marketing getting ahead of science. Patient safety is at risk.” The ASPS doesn’t recommend patients undergo these treatments until the drugs’ safety and efficacy have been proven, he said.
“That’s a very safe, conservative and appropriate position, and exactly the position they should take,” said Dubrow, who nonetheless says injection lipolysis offers patients a lot of benefits. “When it comes to body shaping, the best treatment is diet and exercise. For people who have diet-resistant areas, liposuction works really well. But surgery and anesthesia have inherent risks, which is why the trend for the past several years has been toward less-invasive techniques,” he said. “The goal is to go from invasive, to less invasive to noninvasive and get the same or better result. This is the way we’re heading with lipodissolve. This is the new frontier. The demand is incredibly high.”
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Other physicians question the safety, say there is no scientific justification. Yet apparently, there is no mechanism to stop physicians from doing this before the scientific data exists.
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