From a May 15, 2002
Associated Press story reported on the MSNBC website comes the above
headline with a story that starts, "Specialty has mushroomed into too much
of a good thing." A study of newborn death rates at Dartmouth Medical
School in Hanover, N.H, found that there were few differences across the
country of newborn death rates regardless of the extent of neonatal care
specialties available.
With the exception of the
areas that the researchers identified as having very few specialists the
study suggests there are far too many doctors and hospital units
specializing in intensive care of premature or sickly babies. The results
of the study showed that once a certain threshold of care is reached, having
even more doctors offers no extra advantage or additional protection to
newborns.
The AP article stated that, "This
oversupply
is not only a profound waste of medical resources, it may also be harmful,
because it may subject babies to unnecessary tests and treatments." Dr.
Kevin Grumbach, a public health researcher at the University of California
at San Francisco, commented on the study in an article he wrote in the New
England Journal of Medicine. In his response he wrote, The researchers
“raise disturbing issues regarding the nation’s unquestioning acceptance
that more is always better with respect to the supply of specialist
physicians and hospital technology.”
The results of the study showed that, newborns in areas with a very low
number of doctors, such as a ratio of 2.7 for every 10,000 births, had a
slightly higher death rate than normal. This translated into a 7 percent
higher death rate than in better-equipped areas. On the other hand, areas
with a supply of doctors ranging from 4.3 to 11.6 neonatologists per 10,000
births all had about the same death rate. Even the most premature babies
were found to die at roughly the same rate in these areas. This basically
showed that after a certain point, more is not necessarily better. Dr. David
Goodman, the pediatrician who led the study said, “Enough may be enough.”
The article
reported that the researchers claim that because of the oversupply, some
healthy newborns may be subjected to unneeded tests and treatments that can
produce harmful side effects. Dr. Grumbach said. “If I have a healthy
full-term baby, I actually don’t want anyone messing around with that baby.
There’s a downside where we meddle too much.”