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medpundit |
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004Thanks for your post on the little eugenics program masquerading as reasonable medical practice. I wonder if you also feel the same way about the "triple screen test." My wife is a Ph.D. in engineering with, obviously, a strong background in statistics. We looked at the stats for triple screen, and given the range of both false positives and false negatives, it seemed like all you'd actually get out of the test was an (unnecessary) recommendation to get an amnio or a false sense of security. Our Ob/Gyn for our first child (youngish woman) seemed nonplussed. Our current doc (older man) didn't bat an eye (we have a baby boy due in April). [Also, in keeping with your themes about how insurance, etc. is making it harder to practice medicine, our first Ob/Gyn left her practice, along with the Obstetrician who delivered my daughter, to set up a practice to do laser removal of varicose veins. When two excellent Ob/Gyns in their late 30's -early 40's, with all that training and experience, decide to do cosmetic surgery instead of deliver babies, you know something is very, very wrong in the American medical system, and the problem is not with the doctors]. The triple screen is a blood test that checks for three markers of possible birth defects -human chorionic gonadotropin, estriol, and alpha-fetoprotein. The idea behind screening is to 1) help the parents and the doctor prepare for an abnormal child or 2) allow the option for an abortion if all is not normal. I feel the same about the test as the writer, and never opted to have it done during any of my pregnancies. My last obstetrician disagreed with my decision, though. He had recently, unexpectedly, delivered a baby with a severe neural tube defect that required a lot of intensive intervention at birth and he wanted to minimize the potential for nasty surprises at the bedside. He respected my decision, but he wasn't happy about it. On The Doctors Dean: More reader mail: It seems to me that the Dean family comes as close to having it all as humanly possible: - He went into politics, she's stayed in medicine. - She didn't pretend that she had become a political junkie; he obviously didn't try to force her to. (Bravo for both of them!) - He was the away parent, she was the close to home parent. Obviously there's a lot of love, loyalty and flexibility in the Dean family. Both parents have allowed the other to follow their heart. That's something to celebrate, not criticize. It was bad enough when the "little woman" was supposed to stay in the background; now, in these enlightened days, we demand that the wife make almost as many public appearance as her husband, the candidate. The wife of a candidate is still expected to fulfill a demeaning stereotype, just a different one. So much for progress. Amen. posted by Sydney on 1/28/2004 05:36:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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