“In medicine we need less marketing and more medicine,” says Dr. Raja Flores, Chairman of Thoracic Surgery at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. When it comes to surgery “what they [patients] really need is a good doctor,” says Dr. Flores. “You want somebody that is on top of the latest, cutting edge medical and surgical therapy, but you want to distinguish it from someone who is using it as a gimmick.”
To drill down a bit, for lung cancer surgery, there are several surgical options available and some are more heavily marketed than others. For instance, robot-assisted surgery is often promoted as the best and most technologically advanced form of cancer treatment. But clinical studies have shown that outcomes are similar to those with video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS).
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