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Doctors Are Creating Too Many Patients
Hugh Pickens writes "H. Gilbert Welch writes in the LA Times that the threshold for diagnosis has fallen too low, with physicians making diagnoses in individuals who wouldn't have been considered sick in the past, raising healthcare costs for everyone. Part of the explanation is technological: diagnostic tests able to detect biochemical and anatomic abnormalities that were undetectable in the past. 'But part of the explanation is behavioral: We look harder for things to be wrong. We test more often, we are more likely to test people who have no symptoms, and we have changed the rules about what degree of abnormality constitutes disease (a fasting blood sugar of 130 was not considered to be diabetes before 1997; now it is).' Welch says the problem is that low thresholds have a way of leading to treatments that are worse than the disease. 'We are trained to focus on the few we might be able to help, even if it's only 1 out of 100 (the benefit of lowering cholesterol in those with normal cholesterol but elevated C-reactive protein) or 1 out of 1,000 (the benefit of breast and prostate cancer screening),' writes Welch. 'But it's time for everyone to start caring about what happens to the other 999.'"
Perhaps the title of the article should read lawyers and doctors create too many patients.
So we should wait till everyone is symptomatic?
Many conditions can be treated more effectively and cheaply if they're detected early.
Some conditions dont' even become symptomatic until significant damage is done.
The question really is how to balance the best treatment with the financial constraints.
You'd expect doctors to know how to use contraceptives to prevent this.
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Diabetes is something you're never cured from. No matter what such and such a diet might say, it may greatly improve things, but the diabetes is still there. Fasting blood sugar over 126 is a sign that something is up. Starting lifestyle changes and/or beginning treatment early on helps slow down the progression, and avoids later complications. In this case it actually reduces the number of patients with severe complications... It's not a case of declaring people diabetic who aren't really. It's a case of getting it under control before it progresses too much. Because if you hit 130, without at least diet changes, the diabetes is most definitely going to get worse.
Study after study shows people with access to more health care live longer. I'll point out John McCain and Earvin "Magic" Johnson as too people that'd be dead w/o the extensive and highly personalized healthcare they receive. This sounds like another conservative shill trying to convince the poor they don't need to see doctors like their rich people do, but than again the author could be another one of those Homeopath loons/Charlestons...
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As I understand the current situation:
1) If they don't do the tests and catch a problem, the doctor and hospital will be sued.
1a) The results of a trial may put licenses at risk, depending upon the State Board's agressiveness.
2) If they due the tests either tax subsidized insurance or a Medicare type program will pay for the tests and treatment.
Conclusion: How could the situation any different.......
You were demonstrably sick.
Here's what generally happens in the US of ADD. Someone comes in to the doctor's office overtired. They have a cold because they overworked themselves and shot their immune system to hell through fatigue.
The doctor then proceeds to order up bloodwork, EKG, MRI... a thousand useless tests. Even worse is the "full body scan" crap advertised on Right Wing Wacko Radio lately. Spend thousands of dollars getting scanned, followed by thousands of dollars fixing the 3-4 "abnormalities" it finds in every human that are of no danger to your life whatsoever.
Y'know what would have worked equally well? Send them home with a doctor's note, have them get some fucking rest, and while we are at it, reinstitute actual worker protections so that they weren't burning the candle at 5 ends at their job taking home 50+ hours of work home each week on top of the 60 they already spend in the office including "working through lunch" out of fear that thanks to the the Retardicans fucking up the economy they're going to get downsized or replaced or their job sent to India.
This is very worrisome, glad to see it being discussed. According to the USA Bureau of Labor Statistics, health care employment accounts for (by far) most of the growth in jobs in the USA http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs035.htm. What happens when a new sport surgeon opens an office in your county? What happens when a urologist opens an office in a town of 10,000 residents? The free market says that when people take employment providing a "service" which they themselves are empowered to prescribe, that prescription rates increase proportionately to the wages.
I realized this when I broke my arm in almost precisely the same place, in almost exactly the same way. The first time it was a reset, an X-ray, and a cast. The second time, a new Osteopath building had been opened in town, with two new very smart and very nice doctors. Good people. Outcome was surgery, metal plates, screws, therapy, etc. My insurance paid for both treatments, but I got to see the bills. The second broken arm was over $10,000 more expensive than the first time. And when I read about the dangers of putting people under anesthesia, I really wonder how the risk was weighed against the benefit of making payments on the new doctor's office. I'm not grossly cynical about the health industry, but whenever a field of the economy becomes too respected (think Catholic Church), people begin to assume the best, and that's a recipe for problems.
By the way, there is a new Urologist in my town of 10,000, with a lovely office. He just told my wife that both our sons need teen circumcision, under anethesia. What is really worrisome is that the USA's aging population makes for an almost infinite number of diagnostic tests, etc., for these people to fill. If the government paid for car repairs, we'd have lots of mechanics and lots of repairs.
Gently reply
I realize not every doctor is actually good, and that they can make egregious errors and need to be corrected. Enact tort reform, cap damages, and actually encourage preventative medicine instead of paying lip service to it and you'll get lower costs and better yield for the non-sick 999.
I don't expect a doctor to start caring about the other 999 until that 1 possibly sick person can't sue him and take everything he owns.
In a court of law the question to be asked "Was there a test to determine the problem with my client's husband that would have saved his life if you had done it?" That single question is the reason for all of this, because if the answer is "yes", which is always is even if there were no legitimate reason to run said test, then the doctor is guilty of malpractice. He does that three times, he is no longer a doctor.
Stop blaming the people trying to help you, who have to protect themselves from the lawyers. Blame the root cause.
TFA makes a lot of assertions about unnecessary treatment and increased costs with no associated benefits, but doesn't present or link to a single piece of actual peer-reviewed data. In the specific case of changing the cutoff of blood glucose levels from 140 to 130, the appropriate question to ask is whether or not treating the many side effects of diabetes sooner saves more than it costs.
I'm an ER doctor. I can't create patients as they come to me with symptoms. I will say that people come to me with minimal symptoms such as cough and fever and then demand blood work, X-rays, and antibiotics, even though the majority of the time their symptoms are caused by a virus and will get better all on their own. Somehow, our society has become so weak that every cough, scraped knee, or hangnail requires a visit to the hospital. And somehow we think that physicians can't diagnose anything without a thousand dollars worth of painful tests. Whenever I try to explain to someone, "You have a cold. You're going to be fine," that's not a good enough explanation. I've even had a few people demanding admission to the hospital---which, if you didn't have a life-threatening disease before, you can certainly pick one up during a hospital stay. This problem is societal in nature and has been made worse with television shows such as House and ER where lay think that every problem requires specialists and lots and lots of tests. Don't blame me; I'm just a cog in the wheel.
Because where I live, I suffered from a crippling disease for 5 years that almost ended up fatally, and going week after week after week to the medic, treated like a liar or an attention whore, coming back home every day without results.
Until, finally, after years of calamity, they found what it was. About f*cking time if you ask me, it ended up being a serious intestinal disease combined with a esophagus and a circulatory thing and lots of inconvenient little things.
Please take note of the time. 5 years of my life lost without being able to go out of home and unable to work, socialize or well, just about anything that wasn't being yellowish in color.
Because of medics, who could have detected this much earlier, I lost the best years of my life, the ones between young adulthood and proper adulthood. I am like a hermit who just came out of a cave. All because medics didn't want to do a bit of work and do science stuff.
Here, where free healthcare exists, medics are only concerned about getting their taxpayer-founded salary every month, and don't give a crap if the patient dies or not.
After seeing medic after medic and having to hear "it must be psychosomatic" for years, I have very little respect for the medical guys.
A medic like the ones described in the article would have saved me 5 years of my life. That's not something trivial.
in the UK for the NHS, and her position on this has always been that patients want you to diagnose them with something, and if you do not then they will re-present either to another doctor at your practice very quickly, or at the local accident and emergency room. And last month she was provided with the best example of this ever...
Ever since I met her, she has complained to me (in a friendly way) that people present to the A&E (she was working A&E minors at the time) with conditions that 30 years ago would have been treated at home, but because the home remedy and care experience isn't being passed down these days, current generations of parents do not know how to care for minor conditions any more and are quick to panic.
One example of this is D&V (diarrhea and vomiting - generally any tummy bug that causes you to crap loads and throw up loads) - patients, or the parents of young patients, will regularly show up to A&E with D&V and expect the doctors to do something. If they were to be admitted, it would remove a bed from use for other more serious reasons, and the only thing they would get would be intravenous saline, and thats not even guaranteed. Seriously, would you rather be crapping and throwing up at home in privacy, or in a hospital in public? Do it at home folks.
Anyhow, on with the example - in this case, she was working as a GP at a practice and a mother presented her 3 year old child with D&V, my wife kindly explained that everything was fine, the kid was not in undue distress, they don't tend to worry that the kids not eating or drinking for at least 5 days, and it was just a case of waiting it out. After a lengthy consultation, the mother and child left.
Four hours later, my wife switched to do a locum shift at the local A&E department - and who was her second patient...? The mother and child. The child hadn't presented any more serious symptoms and had not declined in condition, the mother just wanted someone to do something. So my wife, who had suffered the embarresment of calling the patient in and realising why they were here (the parents faces went bright red when they realised who the doctor was that was calling them apparently), had the job of telling them exactly the same thing again.
To put their minds at ease, she called her senior in who explained the same thing. And then just to top it off, had a paediatrics doctor come down to again reassure them that the only things they could do was to allow the D&V to run its course. After a six hour period in A&E, the parents and child left with no treatment, no medication and essentially nothing gained.
And then my wife finds out, a day later, that the parents had driven the twenty miles to the next major hospitals A&E department and done the same thing there - to be told the same thing and sent home in exactly the same manner.
No names and no identifiable information because I don't know any - my wife is very good at venting but retaining the pertinent private details so even I can't identify the patients.
Long story short, the patients are more of an issue these days than the medical carers - patients thing the doctor is there to treat them and damn them if they don't.
Plus, of course, its easier to overtreat for a minor condition than it is to defend the non-treatment in court for the one case in a million that goes from "minor, non-worrying condition" to "death or loss of limb". One of the things my wife is frightened about is the one in a million case where a reoccuring headache is actually the brain tumour that everyone suspects - but she cannot refer all thirty patients a week who come in with that complaint to the specialist simply because the money isn't there.
I find it rather interesting that this claim is being made when I've found it to be quite the opposite to my experiences overseas, especially in Asia.
In the US, someone gets the cold or even the flu and they just deal it. There's a massive selection of over-the-counter drugs to help deal with so many basic illnesses.
In Taiwan, as an example, feel a bit off and people start insisting you visit the doctor. And why wouldn't they when, thanks to their social healthcare system, it only costs a few dollars for a visit? So people go in constantly for things like simply colds and then get prescribed a ton of medication that aggressively deals with all the symptoms. Of course, the flip side is that their equivalent to our pharmacies are lacking in any real medication.
So doctors end up being overburdened and are underpaid when practicing for the state. Visit those clinics and the routine consists of describing your symptoms, the doctor makes a few assumptions about what you've got and prescribes something for it. I've had visits where they don't even bother measuring heart rate. The expectation is that if you've got something serious it will be apparent when your condition doesn't improve or even worsens. Many doctors open private practices where they can charge whatever they want. It's more expensive but for people willing to spend the money they can get the care they want right from the start.
And it isn't something unique to Taiwan, I've observed similar things in Japan and some parts of Europe. Who the hell isn't going to take advantage of something if it's cheap? In my experience the US is the opposite. Unless you're well-off or have a low co-pay you're going to put a visit off until you really need it.
On the other hand, I have found American doctors to be excessively cautious. But then, I've always attributed that to a fear of lawsuits. They don't want to risk overlooking something that a patient will then come back and blame them for. As always, this is a complicated issue which isn't being properly addressed.
It might not be common knowledge that blood test 'normal ranges' (i.e. the range in which the quantity measured is said to be normal) were determined by taking thousands of healthy volunteers and performing the test - but creating the range based on the middle 95% of normal values. Therefore, even before we started testing people, we deemed 1 in 20 healthy people to be 'abnormal'.
Counting on my fingers, we do a minimum of 22 blood tests on patients admitted to our hospital. Statistically, even if you are well (though that is unlikely given you presented to the hospital, and were assessed and deemed unwell enough to be admitted) at least 1 of these blood results should be abnormal. And I haven't even started on your ECG, radiograph, blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturations, respiratory rate, temperature etc etc etc. And if just one CT scan were performed, that looks at so many metrics, that several are bound to be abnormal to some degree (so called 'benign incidentalomas').
Part of being a good physician is knowing what abnormal results are significant, and what are red herrings. Ignoring a result is a difficult thing to do in medicine (the article has some good reasons why) and takes a good knowledge of the context, as well as plenty of experience, to be confidently able to say 'that is a red-herring'.
I disagree with the writer suggesting that thresholds should simply be raised. This is a stupid and dangerous way of dealing with this problem! The problem isn't how _far_ above threshold the value is, but whether it is or it isn't. Raising the threshold does not eliminate false-positive results, but will undoubtedly result in false-negative results. Tests in medicine are assessed to measure their 'positive predictive value' (see wikipedia), which, simply put, is about choosing a threshold that will find a balance between limiting false-positives, and limiting false-negatives. Instead of blanket raising of thresholds, doctors should be basing their decisions on the _evidence base_ - i.e. research done looking at how patients with these values fare with and without treatment. Only then will we know whether what we are doing is helpful or not.
The writer is writing in a public journal, and I think it is dangerous of him to suggest that some people don't really need treatment for diabetes - a condition that is hard enough to demonstrate to patients the dangerous long-term consequences. I wonder how many people reading this article have decided 'I don't really have diabetes - this person says so! And I thought I felt well, too!' and chucked their meds out the window. And yet, there is very strong research and evidence that shows that people diagnosed with diabetes (whatever their blood sugar) do much better if their blood pressure and glucose levels are kept below certain levels. And by 'doing much better' I mean, have less heart attacks, less strokes, go blind less, have less kidney failure, have less neuropathy and die less. All these things are real-world problems which damage peoples health. We are not just treating a number! (but we only know this from the evidence).
The other side to this argument is social. Here in the U.K. we are proud of having a largely non-private system. With all the cost and time pressures on the NHS, it means that we don't investigate or treat unless we feel it would benefit the patient. If an NHS doctor in the U.K. says you have a health problem, it's something you should probably listen up to, because he is not paid to do that. Of course some would argue that the flip-side is that patients may not get investigated or treated enough, which may be balanced somewhat by the law courts. I'm not saying it's good that doctors say 'well because this person has come in with a,b and c, and even though I don't think it is 'x', we can't justify in a law court not doing investigation 'y', but it does provide a counter balance.
Doctors should try to good, be very careful not to do harm, and base their decisions on rational arguments backed up by evidence.
(the article's suggestion of simply raising the thresholds is idiotic)
What happens when you legislate that the "guberment" will back loans of people who clearly will not pay them back (aka subprime loans)?
The housing market collapses.
That was not the driving factor, most sub-prime loans were not government backed. They were far to large to qualify for that.
What happens when you legislate that you cannot tap your own natural resources because of environmental concerns?
Someone else taps those resources and charges you outrageous prices. $4+ per gallon gas and rising.
Do you think US based oil companies would charge you less out of patriotism? Oil and gas prices are set by international markets for these products.
What happens when you fail to secure the borders?
You get an overwhelming flood of non-taxpaying welfare recipients who destroy your healthcare system, overload your criminal justice system, and undermine your educational system.
Most illegals are young men, between the ages of 18-35. They work here then go back home. They are not a burden but a resource of cheap labor. Also the USA-Mexico Border cannot be secured. It is too large and no fence is going to keep out anyone with a fence.
Either you are sadly misinformed or tragically stupid.
How would you like to work in an industry where you are told here is what you get paid by the government?
Doesn't seem to be a problem in England, Germany, Belgium, France, Norway, etc. etc. etc.
Capitalism is great an all, but some things (like the health of citizens) are more important than profit.
Empathy is irrelevant here. The article is about new techniques being abused to get people to pursue treatment where it is not needed or where it may even be harmful, not that new techniques should not be used, or that new techniques are perfect. Pointing out that someone is offtopic or missing the point is not and excercise of cruelty. No matter when in this post this person with the chinese mystery illness was he would have been considered sick. This is not the case with the original topic And original topic which was not misdiagnoses, but a specific type of misdiagnoses. Diagnosing something as a problem when it is not actually a problem.
Cut of the PC crap where you can't do anything that might offend anyone who is less privileged or worse off than you are. You are doing sick people everywhere a disservice by acting as if they are so fragile that they can't handle some public criticism . While doctors individually are generally well-meaning that doesn't mean there aren't systematic factor about the health care industry that lead lead to something other than wellness. A treatment may or may not be given, and the patient may or may not require it. For instance a doctor afraid of malpractice may diagnose where there is actually not a problem, because it's much harder for spot an error where treatment was given but not necessary than to spot the error where treatment was necessary but not given. Also if people go to the doctor and don't get anything other than a clean bill of health they feel a bit jipped. You go to a doctor when you are wanting treatment, and doctors though well-meaning by humouring this may doing more damage with the treatment than a minor abnormality could.
Yes, the whoosh post was flippant and a bit of a better-than-though game. However moralising is almost always the same sort of one-one-upmanship. "Look at how caring I am, you uncaring fool." You're message would be better received if you just let the facts frame the main point instead of the judgement.