BOSTON — I'm at the New America Foundation conference on how to avoid avoidable care, and things here are getting grim.
It turns out we're in the middle of an epidemic — a tonsillectomy epidemic, to be more specific. Tonsillectomies are the most common procedure, for children, requiring anesthesia. And we're doing more of them: The number of tonsillectomies performed spiked by 74 percent between 1996 and 2006. In 2006 alone, more than a half-million children in the United States got their tonsils removed. The only problem is there's no evidence they work for most children.
