Plea for the end of clinical practice guidelines

James McCormack, a professor of pharmacy at British Columbia University, posted on his YouTube channel, a video clip that adapts the song of the Traveling Wilburys group, "End of the Line", to become "End of the Guidelines". The video begins with a scene from “Life of Brian" where the actor Graham Chapman as a fake Jesus Christ, addresses his followers from the window of his house and says: "You are wrong; you have no need to follow me. Follow no one; be yourselves, each of you is a different person."

Right Care: How to reduce waste

This fourth and last post related to the series "Right Care" from the Lancet magazine ("Definition, gray areas and reversion" was the first, "Between too much and too little", the second, and "Question of attitude", the third), talks about various proposals to reduce the waste with the understanding that the inadequacy in the provision of health services is a wicked problem for which there are no magic solutions and, for this reason, the article "Levers for addressing medical underuse and overuse: achieving high-value health care" makes an effort, which is appreciated, to provide useful ideas to incorporate into the working agendas of both clinical managers and health managers, according to the following proposals to increase the value that health systems should bring to people.

Right Care: focusing on the attitude

Continuing with the "Right Care" series of the Lancet magazine, in this third post (I recall that "Definition, gray areas and reversion" was the first, and "Between too much and too little", the second), I have taken into account the beliefs of patients who, according to Vikas Saini in "Drivers of poor medical care," encourage practices of little value, but I have also described the attitudes of doctors who don’t prioritise the value of clinical practices. Remember that, according to Donald Berwick, between 25% and 33% of health costs are wasted in medical actions that don’t contribute anything or do more harm than good.

Right Care: between too much and too little

In the "Right Care" series of the Lancet magazine, Donald Berwick, in "Avoiding overuse - the next quality frontier", says that inappropriate clinical practices consume between 25% and 33% of health budgets in all countries in the world, but beyond the staggering amount of so much wasted money, there are four characteristics of excess, which Berwick emphasises: a) they affect the full range of health services and all specialties, although unevenly; b) there are specific clinical processes where exaggeration is highly disproportionate; (c) they are not exclusive to rich countries being also found in developing countries and in poor countries, in the latter group still with some dramatic traits, and d) are not related to the greater consumption of resources, since wastage can also be found in areas with less frequencies. 

Some figures of world-wide overuse

In direct observation studies in the first report of the "Right Care" series, it’s estimated that 57% of the antibiotics consumed in China should not have been prescribed, that between 16% and 70% of US hysterectomies are not justified, that 26% of knee arthroplasties in Spain could have been avoided and that 30% of coronary angiographies performed in Italy should not have been indicated. To end this compilation, it’s estimated that there are 6.2 million caesarean sections in excess in the world, half of them in Brazil and China.

Right Care: definition, gray areas and reversals

One of the Right Care Alliance initiatives, led by Vikas Saini and Shannon Brownlee from the Lown Institute in Boston, has been the compiling of 4 reports that are analyzing the misuse, by excess and by default, of health resources from a global perspective.

What does the Lown Institute mean by "right care"?

Before defining the concept of "right care", we must take note of Donald Berwick's definition of quality in the introductory article of the series. The author believes that the quality of care, as we understand it, is too focused on the guarantee of procedures and, despite being correct, the question now is: what do the inappropriate clinical processes mean for people’s health? Berwick states that quality should be understood as the provision of services that respond to people's real needs. So, practically, appropriatness has been filtered in the realm of quality.

Modern clinical management: the basics

In recent decades, clinical management has had a couple of conceptual disruptions that have generated interest in the welfare act as an object of study. The first was when, in the early 90s a group of epidemiologists moved clinical epidemiology from the academy to the consultation and developed evidence-based medicine; and the second came when governments and health professionals became knowledgeable about the clinical work’s ability to do harm. The "To err is human" from the Institute of Medicine report in late 1999 was the turning point of patient safety programs. Now, in the second decade of the century, starting from those two fundaments (security and evidence), all the interest is in knowing what is the value that clinical practice brings to the health of people.

The conceptual foundations of modern clinical management

When less is more: a strategic agenda

When Less Is More: Issues Of Overuse In Health Care – Health Affairs Blog http://t.co/9BabaZFFUY

— Joan Figueres Sendra (@joan_figueres) April 26, 2014

Dr. Joan Figueres, expert in the evaluation of health services, announces with his tweet, of the publication of a post signed by Shannon Brownlee and Vikas Saini, Vice President and respectively President of Lown Institute, along with Christine Cassel, President of ABIM Foundation. This post was published on the blog of Health Affairs on 25 April and in total agreement with Dr. Figueres, I also find it remarkable as I believe that the article does a good overview of the current grade of clinical waste outbreaks and suggests some strategies for engaging physicians, patients and the media in improving the situation, and I will focus on the latter:

"The Right Care Alliance" – The Statement of Principles

In 2012, The Lown Institute held a conference in Cambridge (Boston) with the motto "Avoiding Avoidable Care” which generated a statement aimed at creating a professional, academic and social movement in favour of a new health system that is sustainable, effective, rational, personalized and fair. You would think, of course, that the The Lown Institute refer only to the American system, which we all know is deeply unfair and expensive. And this would be so, if it wasn’t for the fact that, in a system like the Spanish, which is infinitely fairer than theirs, when we analyze it in detail we can also note the clinical practice’s undesirable variations of a scale comparable with the American’s.

For this reason, I think it's worth having a look at the statement promoted by The Lown Institute: "Declaration of Principles of the Right Care Alliance". Look at the following extract from the explanatory memorandum of the Declaration and judge whether they are timely or not:

• Modern medicine offers significant benefits, but at the same time also has a great ability to cause damage.
• The overuse of services is widespread and tacitly accepted by the modern healthcare system
• Overuse exposes patients to iatrogenic disease.
• Overuse distracts resources that could be used in real health needs or in investments in other non-health sectors that influence the health of people as social services, education, nutrition, etc.
• The health sector industry can distort clinical decisions to the point of betraying patients’ trust. 

Clinical Practice Guidelines of dubious ethical values feed malpractices

Clinical guidelines by authors with conflicts of interest = Anti-Evidence Based Medicine. Our latest Right Care blog: http://t.co/Zy3XY7BDok
— Shannon Brownlee (@ShannonBrownlee) June 24, 2013

Shannon Brownlee is the author of "Overtreated. Why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer." This book is the most significant piece of literature in the academic and social movement that empowers valuable clinical practice. The tweet chosen this week refers to "The Right Care Blog". It is an institutional blog of the "Lown Institute" where Mrs. Brownlee is vice president.

Upon entering the blog, you will see that the recommended post is "Conflicted guidelines breed conflicted practice", a text that comments on an article by Jeanne Lenzer in the BMJ, where it is argued that the connivance between the promoters of clinical practice guidelines and the industry are feeding inadequate practices. And to illustrate it, the author selects two examples that have experienced these problems with negative health outcomes of affected patients. One example is TPA, a clot solvent, and the other a recommendation of high dose of corticosteroids for the treatment of spinal cord injuries.

Now that there are many people and many institutions involved in making possible the practice of evidence should reach all corners of the system, it is relevant that there aren’t any ethical questions about the scientific basis of clinical practice.


Jordi Varela

Editor

Less is more: "Overtreated" by Shannon Brownlee

The campaign "Too much medicine" by the British Medical Journal wants to highlight the threat of over diagnosis to the health of individuals, and also expose the inherent waste of resources involved in inappropriate clinical practice. According to the BMJ, there is evidence that more and more people suffer from over diagnosis and overtreatment for a wide range of clinical circumstances such as cases of asthma, chronic renal failure or prostate and thyroid cancer. Through this campaign, the magazine plans to improve awareness among physicians of both the benefits and side effects of treatments and technologies, and thus find out how excesses can be reduced safely and properly.

The editor of the BMJ, Fiona Godlee, gives much attention to the campaign: “As medicine based on evidence, or clinical safety, were the movements of the previous decades, combating excess is a contemporary manifestation of an ancient desire: no harm when we want to heal".

To start talking about this campaign, I thought it would be appropriate to review the book “Overtreated" whose author, Shannon Brownlee is a science journalist who has published in Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, New Republic and Time.

Too much medicine

This is the title of the first chapter of the book, where she writes: “As most clinical practices have never been scientifically proven, when someone was faced with them, it turned out that many of them did not offer a good balance between damage and benefits, they only believed it and let’s review some clinical activities that, having had their base in the moment that have been evaluated, had to be rethought seriously such as tonsillectomies, hysterectomies, frontal lobotomies, radical mastectomies, arthroscopies knee arthritis, radiological screening for lung cancer, inhibitors of proton pump for stomach ulcers, menopause hormone therapy, high-dose chemotherapy for breast cancer, etc."