Do surgeons perform unnecessary operations?
Always a touchy subject among surgeons: kind of a third rail. A most interesting article examining this issue appeared in the April 15 issue of The Economist. It follows. Sawbones, cowboys and cheats Is your doctor, mechanic or taxi-driver cheating you? Economics can help First do no harm, doctors are wont to say. But some find it hard to sit on their hands. In a number of studies in the 1990s, Gianfranco Domenighetti, an economist at the Cantonal Health Office in Ticino, Switzerland, set out to discover whether surgeons performed more operations than were strictly necessary*. He and his colleagues found that the more sophisticated the patient, the less scalpel-happy the doctors. The best informed patients of all are, of course, other doctors. Sure enough, physicians went under the knife much less often than the average Ticino resident. (Lawyers’ wives—whom doctors have good reason to fear—had the fewest hysterectomies of all.) Surgeons belong to a class of experts—including computer e
