I don't believe I am on my own in stating that Thomas Stuttaford doesn't half love to pretend to be a master of everything. His latest offering concerns Deep Vein Thromboses (DVTs) and their sometimes fatal complication, the clot in the lungs called the Pulmonary Embolus (PE).Dr Thomas comes out with some rather dubious statistics that the Department of Health has recently plucked from it's arse:
"DVTs and pulmonary embolisms are estimated, according to a recently published Department of Health report, to account for 25,000 deaths a year in British hospitals."
I would love to know how the DoH 'estimated' this figure, it may have involved the arse plucking that I suggested earlier. Dr Thomas doesn't stop there though:
"The figure of 25,000 fatalities may well be an underestimate because many patients thought to have died from a post-operative chest infection may in reality have initially suffered from small pulmonary emboli."
It may well be a massive overestimate too, as this figure is a complete guesstimate, this doesn't appear to have occurred to Dr Thomas though. His final paragraph then claims that many of these deaths are preventable and that a new drug called 'Pradaxa' will help in this regard:
"If adequate precautions were taken before someone undergoes surgery associated with a high risk of DVT, many of these deaths could be prevented."
Actually Dr Thomas you are completely wrong in this regard, there is absolutely no evidence to back up this statement that you make. DVT prevention (aka prophylaxis) in the form of various drugs has been shown to have no effect at all on mortality and symptomatic DVT rates.
Large cohorts of high risk patients who have received no prophylactic treatment have been shown to be at no increased risk of death compared with their counterparts who have been treated with expensive blood thinning drugs. Dr Thomas doesn't mention this, he seems very keen to blow the trumpet of expensive new drugs, is there a conflict of interest here that he is not revealing?
