Today’s Advice: The Doctor Will Not See You Now

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So what’s in my morning copy of the LA Times today? Let’s take a look.

Page A1: Stomach stapling is a crock. “A new study has found that the surgery does not reduce patients’ medical costs over the six years after they are wheeled out of the operating room.” Actually, it’s worse than that: according to the accompanying chart, medical costs were higher for patients who got bariatric surgery.

Page A7: A group of doctors has made a list of nearly 100 medical procedures that are overused in the United States. “The medical interventions — including early caesarean deliveries, CT scans for head injuries in children and annual Pap tests for middle-aged women — may be necessary in some cases, the physician groups said. But often they are not beneficial and may even cause harm.”

Page A17: Bullying women into getting routine, annual mammograms is a bad idea. “There’s no question that diagnostic mammograms should be performed on women who have discovered a lump. But a growing number of primary-care physicians, surgeons, epidemiologists and women affected by the process have begun to question the value of telling all women they need to be checked regularly with screening mammograms.” And just so you don’t think we’re picking on women here, the same is true for PSA tests for prostate cancer.

Maybe I can get better news elsewhere? Nope. My email this morning has a link to a recent article in Harvard Magazine, in which David Jones tells us that nearly all angioplasties and heart bypass surgeries are useless. “As Jones painstakingly explains, it took years to show whether the procedures prolonged lives; in both cases, subsequent research deflated those early hopes. The interventions—major procedures, with potentially significant side effects—provided little or no improvement in survival rates over standard medical and lifestyle treatment except in the very sickest patients.”

As near as I can tell, aspirin works. Blood pressure meds work. Beyond that, I’m beginning to wonder.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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