But must be done to cover one's butt against lawyers and stupid juries.
Posted on 06/04/2012 5:27:48 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
FOR decades, scientific research has shown that annual physical exams - and many of the screening tests that routinely accompany them - are in many ways pointless or (worse) dangerous, because they can lead to unneeded procedures...
So why do Americans, nearly alone on the planet, remain so devoted to the ritual physical exam and to all of these tests, and why do so many doctors continue to provide them?Indeed, the last decade has seen a boom in what hospitals and health care companies call "executive physicals" - batteries of screening exams for apparently healthy people, purporting to ferret out hidden disease with the zeal of Homeland Security officers searching for terrorists.
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.nytimes.com ...
Mike
How about a yearly sanity checkup on politicians.
I do ask myself who is really paying for all these shiny new hospitals and doctors offices I see springing up everywhere. A lot of the help wanted ads I see are in health care yet supposedly its uberexpensive and nobody can afford it so where are they getting all the money fur new buildings and new employment when it’s supposedly so broken the government has to step in?
The rest of the private sector is contracting while the health care sector is growing like cancer cells even while Obama threatens to put them all out of business. Something doesn’t add up.
But must be done to cover one's butt against lawyers and stupid juries.
We will save money with ObamaCare - eventually. Once the non-government treatment options are obliterated, we will cut back on unnecessary expenses: physical exams, treatment for the elderly, terminal care, prenatal visits, mammograms, Pap smears, and similar nonsense. That’s worth it if critical procedures are available to everyone, if even Sandra Fluke gets all her birth control covered, if Americans of any age can get free abortions on demand through the third trimester and the first few months after birth, and if gender reassignment surgery is available without charge and without parental interference at any age. Liberal priorities are clear, and this election is our opportunity to decide which path to follow.
This is laughable. For years, health insurance providers have made many of the assertions the author makes in this article and were called greedy and uncaring.
“Health care is a basic human right”, says liberals, and that included every procedure under the sun that any patient wants. Now that’s not the case?
Everything’s being turned on its head so that when Obamacare takes effect and medical care goes down the tubes, we’ll have been brainwashed into believing that it’s better this way.
In the last few months, we’ve learned that routine mammagrams, routine PSA tests, cholesterol testing, and routine colonoscopies are not necessary in otherwise healthy people.
According to the author, all the preventive care we need is to occasionally take our blood pressure at the drug store.
At some point soon, I am fully expecting advocacy for just dropping babies in the backyard under a tree rather than going to the delivery room.
Here’s my anecdote. I haven’t been to the doc for close to a decade.
Then, I found a doc who was sort into this simpler approach. So I went to him. All we did was talk, blood pressure, weight and basic stethoscope. End of the day if blood pressure, weight, heart sounds good, then, he didn’t do blood work or urinalysis. Which is fine by me. We did visit a lot about lifestyle and history, and also about this very concept of too much testing.
I feel sort of let off the hook for my previous decade of “neglect” in not going to a doc at all.
Keep the weight under control, have a sensible diet (that’s not easy of course...), and exercise vigorously, often, and I think that covers a lot of ground.
My personal opinion, of course, but it is also the opinion of the doc I go to now.....
I didn’t look — was this another from Kathleen “women don’t need Pap smears” Sebellius? Thanks SoFloFreeper.
It's the era of ‘big’ hospital systems, with hospital administrators getting huge salaries while gobbling up private practices - and a transition in which physicians are employed by the hospitals. As such, some hospital systems are rolling in cash right now, while others go bankrupt and are acquired. In the end, the movement is away from individual care from a committed physician who has a personal relationship with you.
The issue of ‘physical examinations’ is related, and is a complex one. First, many patients are adamant about having ‘a physical’, and drive the numbers performed as much as any other factor. Second, when policy wonks decided that ‘preventative medicine’ was going to be the answer to medical costs, implicit in their thinking was the idea that ‘if only people could see a doctor regularly and not have to worry about paying for the visit, costly diseases could be prevented’. Like most if not all things policy wonks come up with, it was based on very flawed logic. If a person is 300 pounds, smokes, and gets no exercise, it isn't a physical examination that is going to define how long they live, and a 15 min. (or even 1 hour visit) with a physician is not going to convince them one way or another to change their lifestyle.
“Keep the weight under control, have a sensible diet (that’s not easy of course...), and exercise vigorously, often, and I think that covers a lot of ground.”
Absolutely correct.
Yeah my friend skipped a few annual physicals and now he’s dead from colon cancer.
My father was hurting after mowing an acre with a push mower. His feet hurt. That night, the joint of his big toe started swelling. He went to the doctor who asked some questions and only ordered an X-ray because my Dad demanded it. The doctor started lecturing him on gout, until the X-ray came back and showed a cracked toe bone. Then he put Dad in a protective wrap / shoe thing.
If you don’t get the right to demand tests for the less likely things, doctors are likely to diagnose you incorrectly.
Many liberals like the author of this article also assume that eating lots of organic fruits and vegetables and taking long hikes outside guarantees health. This may improve your health, but it does not eliminate the need for joint replacements for arthritis, repair damage from age or cure diabetes and existing medical conditions.
First, patients aren’t just waltzing into their doctors offices and demanding all these tests. The frequency and value of doing these tests has been proven by medical experts, i.e. real medical doctors treating real patients, not just government bean counters looking at aggregate statistics. Many doctors have to beg their patients to get these tests which may be uncomfortable (for example, the annual anal probe for prostate enlargement or colonoscopy) and may not be fully covered by health insurance. Second, all patients are different with different risk factors. Some people with family histories of diseases or who are in known high risk categories NEED to be screened more frequently. The best way to determine what tests you need is in consultation with your personal physician who knows your medical history. These “studies”are just another example of government run one size fits all programs.
For years the liberal drumbeat was that it was “essential” that the government provide “preventative medicine”, because it was inexpensive and saved vast amounts of money by catching problems early.
But at some point, liberals got on the “pro-death” bandwagon and now actively push for things that kill people.
So now they want to prevent men from getting prostate exams, women from getting breast cancer exams, to go for the European model of euthanasia with “suicide booth” ease, as well as abortion, voluntary or not, often performed automatically by “physicians”, of less than perfect children with as petty a “deformity” as a hairlip, who then claim the child was stillborn.
It’s like the socialist beloved Hegelian dialectic, with the ‘thesis’ of the worst abuses of the Nazis, blended with the ‘antithesis’ of the worst abuses of the communists, to create the ‘synthesis’, a modern liberal death cult.
Whose motto can best be expressed as “Kill all the people, so that the Earth can heal.”
Socialists, unrepentant, have not forgotten the glory days of the revolution. With every breath they take, they plot their return to power. Health "care" is but a stepping stone along the road.
As we go about our daily lives, we can forget that powerful groups out there continue to work feverishly toward that goal.
Whose motto can best be expressed as “Kill all the people, so that the Earth can heal.”
This bears repeating.
The liberals are now on the “pro-death” bandwagon because they found doctors save those damned conservatives as well.
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