Penn Medicine is going all in on proton therapy, a costly treatment that is unproven for most common cancers
The explosive growth worries Vikas Saini, a cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute, a think tank that examines quality, cost, and equity across health care. He said doctors are prescribing proton therapy in a gray area — they think it may be better for a patient than the cheaper alternative, but there’s no hard proof.
“Everybody knows the game: You get an approval, and you go out on the market, then you expand the indications,” Saini said. “It’s called indication creep, or scope creep.”
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