There’s a new paper out in Archives of Internal Medicine, which I am sure is causing consternation among many primary care physicians. “General Health Checks in Adults for Reducing Morbidity and Mortality From Disease“:
General health checks do not improve important outcomes and are unlikely to ever do so based on the pooled results of this meta-analysis spanning decades of experience. We should be clear about what a general health check is. A general health check is a visit dedicated solely to preventive counseling and screening tests. Other names, such as annual physical, preventive health examination, or periodic health evaluation, are often used. These terms exclude preventive care that occurs during visits for other reasons, such as during chronic care or acute care visits. In other words, we are talking about screening and counseling in addition to the prevention measures that occur during routine medical care…
General health checks are one of the most common reasons adults seek medical care, with an estimated 44 million seeing a physician for this reason each year from 2002 through 2004. During these health checks, an estimated $322 million is spent annually on laboratory tests that no guideline groups recommend. The costs of downstream testing and overtreatment are likely to be much larger. For example, the costs of mammography might be $4 billion a year assuming biennial screening. The cost of follow-up biopsies of normal breasts triggered by false-positive mammogram results alone is probably in the range of $14 to $70 billion annually. It is likely that follow-up testing from general health checks substantially contributes to the estimated $210 billion in annual spending on unnecessary medical services.
The authors correctly note that changing people’s assumptions about checkups will be unbelievably hard. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
Go read the whole thing.
