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From Men's Journal:
Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.
Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.
What do you people think, will people change if they know this?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:12PM
You are correct in the former, AC, donno about the latter, sounds believable.
The problem with defensive medicine is you can replace a very expensively educated doctor with a very small shell script.
Then again since 1950 or so, you could replace a very expensive pharmacist with a vending machine, and we're still stuck with them. Like, WTF? It would be like if travel agents still existed, or local bookstores. Its just weird. I remember being a smart as hell young kid (as opposed to my currently being a smart old-ish man) and thinking, yeah, that pharmacist gig sounds like it would be an awesome lifestyle, but those guys are all going to be replaced by a vending machine powered by one of those new fangled microprocessors like that brand new 8080, so forget pharmacy school. And here I am in 2015, if I had become a human vending machine I'd probably own a private island by now, but no, I'm slinging boring Scala code for internal apps and maintaining Perl data processors. Bummer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:31AM
I realize you were just making a simple point, but I must argue that "very expensively educated" is not equivalent to an actual good, effective doctor. In fact possibly it's an inverse correlation where it's all prestige on the degree and no actual practical experience (heaven forbid we let our students touch actual patients, any incident could destroy our reputation!). Speaking from experience as a cheaply educated 3rd world doc who scored much much higher on the USMLE than US candidates did...
It's nice to read about all these fancy tests you can do in America but out here in the boondocks where there are only 3 CT and 1 MRI (and no PET) machines in the country, lab tests are extremely limited, etc, well, we tend to rely more on little things like patient clinical history and physical exam, basic tests and brainpower. And we seem to be doing quite ok, statistic wise... our limited health dollars go much, much further. At one point medicine becomes about all the toys and tests and the patient is forgotten. I always tell students TREAT THE PATIENT NOT THE LAB RESULTS.