Yet more evidence that expensive technology drives treatment decisions in medicine: A new survey of prostate cancer treatment shows that once a hospital invests the $1 million to $2.5 million it takes to get a surgical robot, men in the area start to get a lot more prostate removal surgery than they otherwise would.
Although heavily marketed, robotic surgery has never been proven to reduce the two big risks of prostate removal: incontinence and impotence. And each surgery with a robot is about $2,000 more expensive than those done the traditional way.
An excerpt from a New York Times piece on the new study:
One reason for the increase in operations in hospitals that own a surgical robot may be that the technology helps a hospital lure potential surgical patients away from the competition. But the data also suggest that once a hospital obtains a robot, patients who might be candidates for nonsurgical options are more likely to be steered toward robotic surgery instead.
“This may be the medical embodiment of the phrase, ‘If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,'”said the lead study author, Dr. Danil V. Makarov, assistant professor of urology at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “If you have the technology, it will get used.”
…
“If you’re a hospital and you get a robot, clearly you want to use it,” said Dr. David Penson, a study co-author and director of the Center for Surgical Quality and Outcomes Research at Vanderbilt University. “There are some real pressures here that have nothing to do with science,” he said. “We have this interplay of patients’ fascination with technology coupled with business interests on the part of the hospital and device makers, pushing people to try a new technology perhaps before it’s been fully tested.”
And here’s a good bottom line point for patients, also from the Times article:
“For patients, there are a lot of choices in prostate cancer,” said Dr. Makarov. “Knowing that technology can influence both what they want and what their physician may advise them should make them a little more skeptical and maybe make them ask a few more questions.”
