ISD technology: a strategy for reduction of low-dose radiation exposure in human beings

The primary purpose of this project is to refocus the current national health care debate. It is the first attempt to provide scientists, health care providers, health care policy makers, politicians, health care payers and public health advocates with a method to improve health care and cut costs through decision-making strategies based primarily on medical standards and secondarily on fiscal considerations. The method for decision-making described in this paper proves more cost-effective and medically sound than current practices. Illness Specific Diagnostic (ISD) tables are introduced as a method to reduce inappropriate use of ionizing radiation in medicine. The use of ISD tables destroys the myth of a single medical standard of care and focuses on the diagnostician as the individual most capable of diagnosing disease(s) in human beings. Additionally, ionizing radiation has been used routinely under the guise that the resulting benefits outweigh the risks involved in a procedure. This dubious tradition is questioned in this document. Attention is drawn to the inappropriate amount of radiation patients receive when ionizing diagnostic tests are performed with marginal or no diagnostic benefit. The results of a pilot study are presented that explicate the reduction of needless radiation to patients and associated reduction of costs that becomes possible in the presence of appropriate scientific medical standards. Ultimately, quality medicine is indeed the most cost-effective medicine possible. The current practice by which the United States Congress issues laws aimed at dictating quality medicine is both desperate and dangerous. Politicians and legislators would be wise to focus their efforts on methodologies that establish standards of care in a scientific manner that does not interfere with medical practice. ISD technology is precisely such a scientific method. It establishes the standard of medical care at the facility from which the ISD tables are generated. ISD tables bring much needed order to diagnostic testing and create a level playing field with which to evaluate medical centers' specificity, sensitivity, and ability to diagnose and treat diseases in humans. (author)