This week’s New Yorker magazine
has another great article called “Overkill” by one of my favorite medical
writers, Atul Gawande. It’s about how
new medical technologies and partnerships between doctors and health care
systems have combined to produce excessive testing and scanning. These often render no
value except to find abnormalities that do not need to be treated because they
will never cause harm. He goes into some
potential solutions as well. It is a
comprehensive but enlightening article. Enjoy!
Below are some excerpts as well
as the link to the article.
An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is
harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?
 |
| Stuart Bradford in The New York Times |
“Low value care is defined as one of twenty-six tests or treatments that
scientific and professional organizations have consistently determined to have
no benefit or to be outright harmful. In just a
single year, the researchers reported, twenty-five to forty-two per cent of
Medicare patients received at least one of the twenty-six useless tests and
treatments.”
“The virtuous patient is up against long odds, however. One
major problem is what economists call information asymmetry. In 1963, Kenneth
Arrow, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, demonstrated the severe
disadvantages that buyers have when they know less about a good than the seller
does. His prime example was health care. Doctors generally know more about the
value of a given medical treatment than patients, who have little ability to
determine the quality of the advice they are getting. Doctors, therefore, are
in a powerful position. We can recommend care of little or no value because it
enhances our incomes, because it’s our habit, or because we genuinely but
incorrectly believe in it, and patients will tend to follow our
recommendations.”
“Overtesting has also created a new, unanticipated problem:
overdiagnosis. This isn’t misdiagnosis—the erroneous diagnosis of a disease.
This is the correct diagnosis of a disease that is never going to bother you in
your lifetime.”
“H. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth Medical School professor, is
an expert on overdiagnosis, and in his excellent new book, “Less Medicine, More
Health,” he explains the phenomenon this way: 'we’ve assumed, he says, that
cancers are all like rabbits that you want to catch before they escape the
barnyard pen. But some are more like birds—the most aggressive cancers have
already taken flight before you can discover them, which is why some people
still die from cancer, despite early detection. And lots are more like turtles.
They aren’t going anywhere. Removing them won’t make any difference'.”
“We’ve learned these lessons the hard way. Over the past
two decades, we’ve tripled the number of thyroid cancers we detect and remove
in the United States, but we haven’t reduced the death rate at all. In South
Korea, widespread ultrasound screening has led to a fifteen-fold increase in
detection of small thyroid cancers. Thyroid cancer is now the No. 1 cancer
diagnosed and treated in that country. But, as Welch points out, the death rate
hasn’t dropped one iota there, either. (Meanwhile, the number of people with
permanent complications from thyroid surgery has skyrocketed.) It’s all
over-diagnosis. We’re just catching turtles.”
“Every cancer has a different ratio of
rabbits, turtles, and birds, which makes the story enormously complicated. A
recent review concludes that, depending on the organ involved, anywhere from
fifteen to seventy-five per cent of cancers found are indolent
tumors—turtles—that have stopped growing or are growing too slowly to be
life-threatening.”
“We now have a vast and costly health-care industry devoted
to finding and responding to turtles. Our ever more sensitive technologies turn
up more and more abnormalities—cancers, clogged arteries, damaged-looking knees
and backs—that aren’t actually causing problems and never will. And then we
doctors try to fix them, even though the result is often more harm than good.”
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