Doctors' Favorite Phrase - YOU'RE GONNA DIE, UNLESS...!
For years I've believed doctors and medical practitioners have over prescribed, over surgery-ed, over tested and viewed patients as cash-cows, for the most part. KA-CHING, KA-CHING. They can, because they know how to strike fear in the hearts of us unknowing lay-people. They don't even have to use words; it's assumed that if you don't get this or that expensive test or procedure done... YOU'RE GONNA DIE!
Guess what THEY MAKE ME SICK!
thinkingblue
PS: Hey but when you really need, and I mean need a doctor to save your life. Thank goodness, when you can find the right one who is capable of giving you an extension on your expiration date. Read the article below for some insight...
One Word Can Save Your Life: No!
Aug 14, 2011 10:00 AM EDT
New research shows how some common tests and procedures aren’t just expensive, but can do more harm than good.
Dr. Stephen Smith, Professor emeritus of family medicine at Brown University School of Medicine, tells his physician not to order a PSA blood test for prostate cancer or an annual electrocardiogram to screen for heart irregularities, since neither test has been shown to save lives. Rather, both tests frequently find innocuous quirks that can lead to a dangerous odyssey of tests and procedures. Dr. Rita Redberg, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and editor of the prestigious Archives of Internal Medicine, has no intention of having a screening mammogram even though her 50th birthday has come and gone. That’s the age at which women are advised to get one. But, says Redberg, they detect too many false positives (suspicious spots that turn out, upon biopsy, to be nothing) and tumors that might regress on their own, and there is little if any evidence that they save lives.
These physicians are not anti-medicine. They are not trying to save money on their copayments or deductibles. And they are not trying to rein in the nation’s soaring health-care costs, which at $2.7 trillion account for fully one sixth of every dollar spent in the U.S. They are applying to their personal lives a message they have become increasingly vocal about in their roles as biomedical researchers and doctors: more health care often means worse health. “There are many areas of medicine where not testing, not imaging, and not treating actually result in better health outcomes,” Redberg says. In other words, “less is more.” Archives, which is owned by the American Medical Association, has been publishing study after study about tests and treatments that do more harm than good.
That less health care can lead to better health and, conversely, that more health care can harm health, runs counter to most patients’ conviction that screenings and treatments are inherently beneficial. That belief is fueled by the flood of new technologies and drugs that have reached the market in the past two or three decades, promising to prevent disease and extend life. Most of us wouldn’t think twice if our doctor offered a test that has the power to expose a lurking tumor, or a clogged artery, or a heart arrhythmia. Better to know—and get treated—than to take any risks, the reasoning goes.
In fact, for many otherwise healthy people, tests often lead to more tests, which can lead to interventions based on a possible problem that may have gone away on its own or ultimately proved harmless. Patients can easily be fooled when a screening test detects, or an intervention treats, an abnormality, and their health improves, says cardiologist Michael Lauer of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. In fact, says Lauer, that abnormality may not have been the cause of the problem or a threat to future health: “All you’ve done is misclassify someone with no disease as having disease.” MORE HERE
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The Don’t-Do
List: 4 Over-Prescribed Treatments and Tests
by Reader's Digest Magazine, on Wed Aug 17, 2011 11:49am PDT
What doctors do is important. Equally important: what they
don’t do. To keep patients healthier, prevent
unnecessary treatment (and side effects), and save
health-care dollars, a panel of doctors is urging internists,
family medicine specialists, and pediatricians to follow
top-five lists of medical don’ts. Here are some of those
tests and procedures — and the go-slow approaches that
are preferable.
Lower-Back Pain
Don’t do an imaging test within the first six weeks
except in special cases.
“The vast majority of back pain goes away on its
own,” says Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why
Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. “A
back image is not going to help you heal faster, but it can
mislead your doctor into thinking that something is wrong,
which can lead to costly and unnecessary surgery.” Of
course, sometimes tests and treatments are unavoidable (say,
if you’re also having bladder problems), so make sure
your doctor listens carefully to all your symptoms, says
Jerome Groopman, MD, coauthor of the forthcoming Your Medical
Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You. “A really
good doctor doesn’t follow a cookbook,” Dr.
Groopman says.
Bone-Density Screening
Don’t do a routine bone-density test for women under 65
or men under 70.
The standard test, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA),
measures the mineral content of your bones, but “for
premenopausal women, routine screening is a huge scam,”
says Brownlee. “It often leads them to take osteoporosis
drugs, which is very controversial at best for that age
group. At that age, you don’t need a DEXA scan to tell
you what you should be doing to prevent osteoporosis.”
PLUS: 8 Old Wives' Tales: Which Should You Believe
Electrocardiogram (ECG) Screening
Don’t do an annual test if risk is low.
“If you don’t have symptoms and are at low risk for
heart disease, chances are pretty good that the test is wrong
if it says you do have a problem,” Brownlee says. Even
so, your doctor will almost certainly feel compelled to
follow up with more invasive tests that carry the risk of
injury or even death.
PLUS: 15 Harmless Folk Remedies Worth a Try
Sinus Infection
Don’t give antibiotics for most cases of mild or
moderate sinusitis.
“Antibiotics are not ‘anti-every-kind-of-bug’
drugs,” Brownlee says. “They don’t work
against viruses, and most sinus infections are caused by
viruses.” Plus, overprescribing these drugs can produce
stubborn new bacterial strains that antibiotics can’t
fight — which can cause problems more serious than sinus
trouble. Don’t ask for the hard stuff unless the sinus
problem is severe or symptoms last longer than a week or get
better and then worsen.
MORE
HERE
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