Medtronic doesn’t supply the latter, but it spent nearly $4 billion in 2007 to purchase a company that makes some of the products included in a kyphoplasty kit. There is little evidence to suggest that kyphoplasties are any better than vertebroplasties, but to a medical-device manufacturer, there’s an important distinction: A kyphoplasty kit sells for thousands of dollars more than a vertebroplasty kit, which generally costs a few hundred dollars. Schelble, Heilman found, was employed by Medtronic, a company that sells medical devices used for, among other things, kyphoplasties. Sifting through the results, he saw that a man named Kim Schelble had an email address that contained the same nickname. “I wouldn't even think twice.”Īs James Heilman thought more about the attempted edit to the page for vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty, he grew curious about who might be trying to write over the controversy of the procedures, so he Googled the would-be editor’s Wikipedia username.
#Wikipedia screenshot editor plus#
“If my mother had a vertebral-compression fracture and after several weeks of conservative management with bed rest, plus or minus bracing, and appropriate pain management, if she still was having ongoing pain and disability, I would treat her,” he says. Sean Tutton is a professor of radiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and spoke to me on behalf of the Society of Interventional Radiology, which put out a position paper with other medical societies that called vertebroplasties safe and effective under the right circumstances. “From my perspective there is no longer any dispute,” she says.
She notes that in Australia, where she lives, public funding for the procedures was withdrawn after the two 2009 studies were published. “To my mind, is an unproven modality and based upon current evidence would have to say it works as well as vertebroplasty, which is to say likely to work as well as a placebo,” says Rachelle Buchbinder, a professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at Australia’s Monash University, as well as a co-author of a recent vertebroplasty review published by the Cochrane Collaboration, a network of independent researchers. Some are concerned about the money being spent on a procedure that’s controversial and sometimes risky. (It’s hard to say an exact number, as the procedures are not recorded in any national database.) In 2011, Medicare paid out around $1 billion for vertebroplasties and kyphoplasties, and the number of the procedures performed each year is not estimated to have decreased significantly since then. By the time two studies published in 2009 found that vertebroplasty-and, by extension, kyphoplasty, which is similar but has not been tested in controlled experiments-was no more effective than a placebo treatment, at least 100,000 of the two procedures were being performed every year. The procedure grew popular in the ‘90s, despite the fact that its effectiveness wasn’t backed up by definitively convincing research.
The procedure is meant to reduce the pain of a fracture, even though it sounds unpleasant: It consists of inflating a tiny plastic balloon near the fracture, removing the balloon, and then injecting a toothpaste-like plastic cement into the resulting crevice and letting it harden. Kyphoplasty, along with vertebroplasty, the procedure it shares a Wikipedia page with, is a common treatment when someone’s spine breaks-a frequent occurrence in people with osteoporosis, which makes bones brittle-and then doesn’t heal naturally.
The page originally suggested that the procedure’s effectiveness was “controversial,” and an unidentified Wikipedia user had proposed changing the text to “well documented and studied”-a characterization that Heilman thought wasn’t supported by existing research. On January 11, 2013, James Heilman, an emergency-room physician and one of Wikipedia’s most prolific medical editors, was standing watch over the online encyclopedia’s entry for a back procedure called a kyphoplasty.
0 kommentar(er)
