Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Going quiet for a while
Just a note to say that I won't be posting much in April, if at all, because I'm focusing my writing energies (outside of work, anyway) on an article about the FDA for The Objective Standard. I'm thrilled to be writing for a journal I respect, and I can't wait to show off the results!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
How cool! Congrats, and I can't wait to read it!
Excellent.
I heard this morning on NPR that the FDA is looking into the safety of LASIK, and I immediately thought of your earlier post about cosmetic surgery, and your upcoming FDA article.
Any thoughts about FDA meddling in one of the few remaining relatively free healthcare markets?
I had not heard this. I have been considering LASIK for myself for some time now, and if this is true, maybe I ought to take the plunge before FDA sticks its dirty hands into the procedure.
I don't have time for a lengthy response at the moment, but in brief: The current LASIK market is a wonderful example of how a free market in healthcare gives people more choices. You can pay a high price and see a doctor who has done the procedure thousands of times with a high success rate, or you can pay a lower price for a perhaps less-experienced doctor -- but the price to be paid and the amount of risk to be assumed are the choice of the patient, not some government bureaucrat. With FDA involvement, I'm sure many of the less expensive options would disappear, and eye surgery would be costlier for everyone.
Based on this AP article in the Boston Globe, the FDA is commissioning a study on safety because of complaints people filed after having the procedure.
It sounds like the typical alarmist junk. 90% of the article discusses the horror stories, and a positive mention of Lasik doesn't occur until the halfway point. One other small positive mention occurs at the end. Other than that, it's all:
"Too many Americans have been harmed by this procedure and it's about time this message was heard," said David Shell...
So I'm sure FDA will use whatever results it finds to justify intrusive regulation.
Post a Comment