5 Common Medical Procedures (That Secretly Aren't Worth It)

[JBeukema]

In addition to providing a window into your body, CT scans deal a superhero-inducing dose of radiation. But rather than letting you shoot webs or adamantium claws out of your hands, the ability it gives you is the power of cancer.
See, each CT scan shoots you with hundreds of times the level of radiation that you get from an X-ray, and some experts now think that one in 50 cases of future cancer will have been caused by all these CT scans.

Like this, if it was followed by months of chemo and a broken family instead of super-powered high jinks.​

Of course, these days, we also have the MRI scan, which is not only superior in every diagnostic sense but has the added benefit of being completely harmless and radiation-free. So hospitals are rapidly switching over, right? Oh no, wait -- CT scans per year in America have shot up to around 62 million and it's estimated that 30 percent of them are completely unnecessary for making a diagnosis.
Why does this go on? We'll give you one guess.

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[uscitizen]

Sarah Palins breast augmentation?

 

[Greenbeard]

It's true that there are lots of warped incentives that promote unnecessary volume. But there are other factors to consider, like lack of (or poor use of) information. And that's an area where technology--in the form of clinical decision support tools--can be helpful:

Do you really need an MRI for that aching back or sore shoulder? How about a CT scan?

For the past three years, more than 2,000 Minnesota doctors have been using a computer program to help answer those questions. They plug in information about an individual patient, and a computer using national guidelines tells them if a CT scan or MRI is a good choice -- or if there's something better.

That simple step has helped save an estimated $28 million a year by eliminating thousands of unnecessary tests, according to the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI), a health research group in Bloomington. [...]

Instead of waiting hours or longer for approval by phone, the doctors get an answer instantly. A popup screen invites them to fill in patient symptoms and other information, and the program rates the usefulness of the proposed test, based on guidelines from the American College of Radiology and other medical specialty groups. If another test is an option, that will pop up, too.

Not long after the pilot project started, Bershow said, one colleague came up to him with a surprise admission. "I've been ordering the wrong test," the doctor told him, but didn't realize it until he started using the program.

That's not surprising, Bershow said, given the information overload in medicine.

Among the common mistakes, he said: Doctors were ordering too many MRIs, particularly for headaches and low back pain, that had little chance of affecting treatment but cost an average of $1,000.