$545 million wasn't enough for chiropractors. Now they're lobbying Congress for much more.

Medicare currently wastes more than $545 million a year on chiropractors, as I revealed in an article last year. Wasteful as this is, it's not enough for chiropractors, who have successfully lobbied to have two Congressmen propose a new bill, HR3654, that will require Medicare to pay chiropractors for the full range of services that real doctors offer.

The American Chiropractic Association is practically rubbing its (metaphorical) hands together with glee. As they proudly point out, this endorsement of quackery is bipartisan: the bill is sponsored by two New York Congressman, Democrat Brian Higgins and Republican Tom Reed.

The idea of having chiropractors function as regular physicians is very troubling. Chiropractors do not receive proper medical training: they get their Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degrees from one of a very small number of special chiropractic schools, which do not provide the full medical training that real medical schools do. Their curriculum also includes a heavy dose of pseudoscience, especially the training around subluxations.

For a detailed discussion of why chiropractors are not competent to be family physicians, I recommend this article by an experienced physician, Dr. Harriett Hall, titled "Chiropractors as family doctors? No way!" Dr. Hall goes into considerable detail explain why many of the medical practices of chiropractors are non-standard, not evidence-based, and possibly harmful. Or see this lengthy takedown of chiropractic subluxations by Sam Homola, a former chiropractor.

Many chiropractors are also anti-vaccine, unfortunately, as documented just two weeks ago in this article by attorney Jann Bellamy. Among other things, Bellamy points out that a major chiropractic conference this fall will feature a keynote talk by anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. (about whom I've written before).

Even more alarming, as I've explained before, is that chiropractic neck manipulation has been shown to carry a small but real risk of stroke, because it can create a tear in your vertebral arteries. For example, this report from 2016 documented a case of cerebral hemorrhage apparently caused by chiropractic manipulation. The patient in that case was a 75-year-old woman, which puts her squarely in the class of patients eligible for Medicare.

And to those chiropractors who've read this far: I'm sorry that you were hoodwinked into spending 3-4 years in a chiropractic school, paying nearly $200,000 in tuition and fees, with the promise that you'd be a legitimate medical professional. You were scammed, and I'm sorry about that. And I understand that most (perhaps all) chiropractors want to help their patients. The problem is, the training offered by chiropractic colleges is far short of a proper medical degree.

If the chiropractors' lobbying association get its way, this $545 million (annually) in wasted Medicare dollars will soon become a far higher amount–to the detriment of patients. The bill will allow chiropractors to bill Medicare for pretty much any service that a bona fide physician offers.

It's also worth noting that in 2018, Medicare's Inspector General issued a report titled "Medicare needs better controls to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse related to chiropractic services," which revealed that almost half of Medicare spending on chiropractic care from 2010-2015, between $257 million and $304 million per year, was likely wasted or fraudulent. One wouldn't think this is a time to expand Medicare's coverage of chiropractic.

Congress, don't be fooled by arguments that this proposed new law will lower medical costs, or give patients what they need: it won't. Instead, it will dramatically increase the amount of funds wasted on ineffective treatments. The U.S. does need a better health care system, but this bill would be a big step in the wrong direction.

The federal government is wasting over half a billion dollars a year on chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation

A book on the abuses of chiropractic,
written by a former chiropractor

Here's a quick way for the U.S. government to save over half a billion dollars. Stop paying for coverage of medical procedures that have little or no evidence to support them.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) now releases annual reports of how much it spends, broken down according to the procedures. Their latest data, for the year 2015, reveals that Medicare spent $564,165,721 on pseudoscientific medical practices.

I'm talking about chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation. These are similar but distinct belief systems, both involving bones, and both with little high-quality evidence to back them up. Most people think that chiropractors' spinal "adjustments" can relieve pain from injured or aching backs. It turns out that it's just an elaborate placebo: a back rub at home is likely to work just as well. And that home treatment is probably safer–I'll get to that below.

Osteopathic manipulative therapy (OMT) was invented out of whole cloth in the mid-19th century by Andrew Still. Still believed that every part of the body was linked by a mysterious "myofascial continuity" and that manipulating it could treat a vast range of aches, pains, and other ailments. Most of this is not true. (There is some evidence that OMT can be beneficial in carefully selected cases of lower back pain, but the evidence is quite thin (see this review), and the CMS codes don't distinguish different uses of OMT.)

Osteopathic manipulation is what Larry Nassar, the now-convicted sexual predator, claimed he was doing to the hundreds of young girls whom he molested over the years when he was a sports doctor at Michigan State University and a doctor for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. (Osteopathic physicians, which is what Nassar was, generally practice real medicine, and I don't mean to suggest that any of them endorse Nassar's awful abuses. However, OMT is a relic of their pseudoscientific past, and Medicare should not be covering it.)

Chiropractic is no better than OMT. It was invented by D.D. Palmer in the 1890s, around the same time that Andrew Still was concocting OMT.  Palmer mistakenly believed that misalignments of the spine, which he called subluxations, caused a vast range of health problems, even infectious diseases. As retired chiropractor Samuel Homola has written,

there is "no evidence at all to support chiropractic subluxation theory," 

but thanks to clever marketing, chiropractors have convinced millions of people to see them on a regular basis. (See chirobase.org for much, much more.)

Even more alarming is that chiropractic adjustments carry a small but frightening risk of causing a stroke, as a result of tearing the vertebral artery, as I've written about before. In fact, the American Heart Association issued a warning in 2014 that "neck manipulation may be associated with stroke". Not surprisingly, the chiropractors association strenuously denied this, but the evidence speaks otherwise. Indeed, a 2015 study that I described when it appeared showed that Medicare patients–the same cohort whom we are paying half a billion dollars a year to provide chiropractic treatments–suffered a significantly higher risk of stroke after seeing a chiropractor than those who instead saw a real doctor.

And a 2003 study in the journal Neurology show an equally alarming increased risk of stroke due to tears in the vertebral artery after chiropractic in younger patients. The lead author of that study, Dr. Wade Smith, warned that

"physicians and patients should be aware of spinal manipulation therapy as a rare but potentially causal factor in stroke."

[Update: note that a 2016 study, in the journal Cureus, found that the link between chiropractic neck manipulation and arterial dissection was not causal; i.e., that chiropractic did not appear to cause arterial tears. However, concerns remain, as demonstrated in this 2017 case report of cerebral hemorrhage following chiropractic activator treatment.]

The 2015 numbers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show that the vast majority of the wasted funds, $545 million, went to chiropractic treatments, with another $19 million going to osteopathic manipulation. Neither amount is justified by scientific evidence.

Let's stop wasting our money on procedures that don't help, and may harm, Medicare patients. If we want to help patients, let's insist that Medicare spend our money on real medicine.

Legalized pot is already saving $165 million per year in medical costs

This news will give anti-marijuana crusaders fits.

A new study in the journal Health Affairs looked in great detail at prescription drug usage in U.S. states that have legalized medical marijuana. Researchers Ashley Bradford and David Bradford collected Medicare data for the period 2010-2013 to answer two questions: are patients choosing marijuana instead of prescription drugs for conditions that marijuana might treat, and what has been the overall effect on Medicare spending?

The bottom line: in 2013 alone, when 17 states had legalized medical marijuana, Medicare saved over $165 million. A simple extrapolation suggests that if all states legalize marijuana, annual savings could be triple that amount, $500 million. (Obviously this extrapolation is over-simplified: it depends on the actual populations of those 17 states, and it only considers Medicare. Commercial healthcare plans may save far more.)

The authors, a father-daughter team at the University of Georgia, looked at over 87 million prescriptions from the Medicare Part D database, focusing only on conditions where marijuana "might serve as an alternative treatment." These fall into nine specific categories for which at least some evidence suggests marijuana could help: anxiety, depression, glaucoma, nausea, pain, psychosis, seizures, sleep disorders and spasticity. The best clinical evidence of marijuana's benefits, according to the study, is for pain, for which the clinical evidence is "moderate"; most of the other conditions have evidence rated as low or very low.

Prescriptions fell for 8 out of 9 categories, with the biggest drop occurring for pain medication: in states with medical marijuana laws, physicians gave out 3645 fewer pain prescriptions per doctor, a difference that is highly statistically significant. Or, in raw numbers, the annual number of daily doses (in 2010-2013) per doctor in states without medical marijuana laws was 31,810. In states with medical marijuana, the number dropped to 28,165. That's an 11.5% drop. Depression and seizures both showed very significant reductions in prescriptions as well.

Prescriptions rose for only one condition: glaucoma. This too was expected–as the article explains,

"Clinical evidence is very strong that while marijuana sharply reduces intraocular pressure, the effect lasts only about an hour. As a result, new patients who seek glaucoma treatment after learning about the potential benefits of marijuana are likely to receive a prescription for an FDA-approved drug."

In an interview posted on the University of Georgia website, study co-author David Bradford states that they also wanted to know if medical marijuana laws were just a backdoor way to allow recreational marijuana use, or if people were really using it as medicine. He continues:

"What our evidence is suggesting is that ... there is a significant amount of actual clinical use at work here."

As of today, 24 states have medical marijuana laws on the books. This new study suggests that legalizing marijuana in all states would save hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicare costs, and even more money for people not covered by Medicare–not to mention the savings from no longer wasting law enforcement resources prosecuting marijuana use.

Opponents of legalization have argued since the 1930's that marijuana is a "gateway drug" that will lead to more serious drug abuse and that it increases criminal behavior, without (as Bradford and Bradford point out) any good evidence proving these links. This new study now provides a strong financial argument for legalization: legalizing marijuana, at least for medical use, will yield substantial savings for our health care system.

Dr. House Was Right

I’m a big fan of the show House, which ran on the Fox TV network for 8 years and is now on Netflix. Gregory House, masterfully played by actor Hugh Laurie, is an brilliant doctor who diagnoses patients whose bewildering symptoms have stymied other doctors. He’s also unbelievably rude: he insults and harrasses his patients and his fellow doctors alike, but they tolerate him - usually - because he’s almost always right.

I doubt that any real doctor is as rude as House. But like any group of professionals, doctors vary widely in their people skills. Recently, though, Medicare has started using patient satisfaction as a component of how it pays hospitals. In response, some doctors now try harder to give patients what they want, rather than what they need, as described last year by Kai Falkenberg at Forbes.  On Medscape recently, William Sonnenberg wrote that “patient satisfaction is overrated” and said of Press Ganey, a company that runs patient satisfaction surveys:

“Press Ganey has become a bigger threat to the practice of good medicine than trial lawyers.”

You can find Medicare's hospital survey online. Dr. House would fail, big time.

What’s wrong with giving patients what they want? It turns out that patient satisfaction is tied to higher costs and, even worse, a higher death rate. A large survey covering 52,000 patients, published by a team led by Joshua Fenton at the University of California-Davis  found that the most satisfied patients not only spent about 9% more than average, but had a 26% higher death rate. From the study: “The most satisfied patients had statistically significantly greater mortality risk compared with the least satisfied patients.”

For patients who think a nice doctor is a good doctor, this might come as very disappointing news. Was the effect due to patients already in poor health, who might be more inclined to like their doctors? No: when the researchers excluded the sickest patients and looked only at the healthier ones, the risk of dying was even higher. (It’s important to note here that this is relative risk; only 3.8% of patients died during the six-year followup to the study.)

Over at The Daily Beast last week, Daniela Drake summarized this trend as “You can’t Yelp your doctor.” (Not that Yelp isn’t useful for finding a good pizza place.) And yet, as Scott Hensley reported on the NPR blog Shots, online ratings of doctors are becoming very popular, even though they don’t measure how good a doctor is at diagnosing and treating illness.

This study has implications for so-called “alternative medicine” as well. Patients who frequent alternative providers such as acupuncturists, homeopaths, and naturopaths often report high levels of satisfaction, as if satisfaction correlated with better care. Now we have a large study showing that this is simply not the case.

It makes sense that patient satisfaction is related to cost: patients often demand treatments that they don’t need, and “Patient requests have also been shown to have a powerful influence on physician prescribing behavior”, as Fenton and colleagues reported. It is less clear why the most satisfied patients died at higher rates.

Obviously, doctors don’t need to act like Dr. House to be effective. But doctors need to be able to tell patients things they don’t want to hear. Just because you want an antibiotic for your sore throat or your child’s ear ache doesn’t mean you should get one.  The UC Davis study demonstrates that using patient satisfaction surveys to adjust reimbursement rates, as Medicare is currently doing, is a recipe for higher costs and lower quality of care.

Given a choice between a friendly doctor who gives me what I want and a brilliant doctor who gives me what I need, I’ll take Dr. House.

Medicare data reveals that U.S. wastes half a billion dollars per year on chiropractic

Hold on, you're about to get "adjusted."

Ten days ago, the federal government released a huge data set detailing how it spent $77 billion in Medicare funds in 2012 to over 880,000 health care providers. The release of this data is part of a new transparency effort by the government, which many of us applaud.

The data reveal some troubling things.

Most news organizations focused on who the biggest beneficiaries are: the New York Times described how just 100 doctors received $610 million. A Washington Post story focused on the top 10 Medicare billers, including one ophthalmologist in Florida who was paid $20 million by Medicare, mostly to cover Lucentis, a drug for macular degeneration. The Post pointed out that Medicare would have saved over $10 million if that doctor used Avastin, which is equally effective. “Medicare pays a doctor more for injecting the more expensive drug,” the Post pointed out.

But until now, no one has pointed out another, far more egregious waste revealed by the Medicare data: we are spending a huge amount of money on the highly dubious practice known as chiropractic.

To be precise, the 2012 Medicare data reveals that in 2012, Medicare paid $496 million for chiropractic.

This is a stunning amount. It dwarfs the funding that NIH wastes on alternative medicine through NCCAM, which is itself an egregious waste of money.

Chiropractors are not medical doctors. They primarily treat back pain, but they claim to treat a wide range of other conditions, which some of them believe are related to mis-alignments of the spine, called subluxations. This belief has no scientific basis. Nevertheless, chiropractors have succeeded in convincing the government to cover their treatments through Medicare.  

Now we know how successful they have been: half a billion dollars a year spent “adjusting” the spines of patients, all funded by Medicare.

(And they have recently been lobbying furiously, as I wrote last summer, to force private health care providers to cover chiropractic and other alternative practices under Obamacare.)

But wait, you might ask, don’t chiropractors provide pain relief? And don’t they have medical degrees? Well, on the second question, the answer is that they have special Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) degrees, which are given out by just 15 special chiropractic colleges in the U.S. The entire field was invented out of thin air by D.D. Palmer in 1895, and later popularized by his son. In his book-length expose Chiropractic Abuse: An Insider's Lament, chiropractor Preston Long lists "20 things most chiropractors won't tell you," including

1. "Chiropractic theory and practice are not based on ... knowledge related to health, disease, and health care. 
2. Many chiropractors promise too much.
3. Our education is vastly inferior to that of medical doctors."

These are just the first three: you can see the full list in a review of Long's book by physician Harriet Hall, or read the book itself.

Sam Homola, a retired chiropractor, summarized his concerns about chiropractic in an article at Science-Based Medicine. Homola concluded that 

“There is no credible evidence to support the use of spinal manipulation for anything other than uncomplicated mechanical-type back pain and … no evidence at all to support chiropractic subluxation theory.”

Perhaps most alarming, especially given that Medicare is paying for millions of treatments per year, is that chiropractic manipulation can cause a stroke, by causing a tear in a major artery running through the neck. As reported recently in the Journal of Neurosurgery:

“Chiropractic manipulation of the cervical spine can produce dissections ... of the vertebral and carotid arteries. These injuries can be severe, requiring endovascular stenting and cranial surgery. In this patient series, a significant percentage (31%, 4/13) of patients were left permanently disabled or died as a result of their arterial injuries.” [Albuquerque et al., J. Neurosurg 2011 115(6):1197-1205]

If this weren’t enough to cause concern, many chiropractors are also anti-vaccine, a problem that is apparently serious enough that some chiropractors themselves have spoken out against the anti-vaxxers in their own ranks.

Over a century ago, D.D. Palmer believed, mistakenly, that he cured a man’s deafness by manipulating his neck. His son built Palmer’s beliefs into a profitable business, but neither of them would have dreamed that the U.S. government would one day spend half a billion dollars per year on chiropractic manipulations. 

If we want to start controlling the cost of Medicare, here’s an easy first step: stop covering chiropractic. We will save $496 million a year, and people’s health will improve.