The Guessing Game We Call The Practice Of Medicine?

According to the American Prospect, your guess may be as good as mine (and your doctor’s) about your medical problem.

It’s easy to forget how much of American medicine is a guessing game, how your treatments are a composite result of your doctor’s experiences, biases, treasured anecdotes, and personal reactions to his own training. Most folks think medicine operates off a rigidly defined set of standards: If you have symptom A, your doc orders tests B, C, and D. Not quite. According to a new study, doctors are ordering useless tests for asymptomatic patients at staggering rates. Of tests that aren’t recommended for patients with a particular batch of complaints, we’re spending between $12 million and $63 million. Worse yet, for tests with risks that outweigh the benefits for certain patients, doctors are ordering them against recommendations over 40 percent of the time, for a total cost reaching into the hundreds of millions. And that’s not even getting into the ricochet tests and expenses that come from false positives found by unnecessary diagnostics.