We found the Newsweek article, One Word Can Save Your Life: No! to be very interesting, chock full of facts concerning health care spending and which tests are really worth taking. Afterall, we have to wonder why our medical costs are soaring in light of all the "preventative", "must-have" tests that are increasingly available.

I recommend reading the entire article here, but the following part is perhaps the most telling: 

"Medical practice also suffers from a kind of mission creep: if a treatment works in severe disease, some doctors assume it will work in milder disease. But that is not necessarily so. Antidepressants, for instance, have been shown in randomized trials to help with severe depression but not with moderate or mild depression, yet are widely prescribed for those conditions. Drugs called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are effective against gastric reflux and rare esophageal diseases as well as some ulcers, but at least half, and possibly 70 percent, of the 113 million U.S. prescriptions for PPIs each year are for conditions they don’t help, such as run-of-the-mill stomachaches. PPIs can cause bone fractures, severe and hard-to-treat bacterial infections, and pneumonia. Millions of people are being put at risk unnecessarily, which is one reason treating adverse drug reactions costs the U.S. $200 billion a year.

Statins, common cholesterol-reducing drugs, may also not benefit some people who are taking them. Statins are proved to help people with both heart disease and high cholesterol, but not those with just high cholesterol. The drugs are nevertheless widely prescribed to patients who fit the latter description, despite adverse effects, such as severe muscle disease in up to 20 percent of patients. Similarly, cardiac resynchronization therapy, a special pacemaker that causes the right and left ventricles to beat in sync, can save the life of a patient with congestive heart failure whose ventricles are at least 150 milliseconds out of sync. Yet patients with a mistiming of 120-150 milliseconds are receiving the devices.

Low-tech tests should sometimes be avoided, too. In an Archives paper published this month, a panel of physicians, led by Brown’s Smith, announced its first list of tests and treatments that should be dropped altogether for certain patients and ailments: antibiotics for sinus infections, imaging for low back pain, osteoporosis screening for women under 65, and electrocardiograms and other cardiac screening in low-risk patients. Even blood panels for healthy adults made the list. Today’s comprehensive blood tests measure 15 or so enzymes, proteins, lipids, and the like. Yet by chance alone, if you test for 20 things, something will fall outside the bounds of “normal,” often due to simple lab error.

Posted in healthy body By TB Admin | Comments