Bone-Strengthening Drug Linked to Fractures
March 15, 2010
ABC News
BY CHRISTINE ROMO and LARA SALAHI
Sandy Potter, 59 of Queens, New York, was jumping rope with neighborhood children when she felt her thigh bone snap.
“I went up in the air and I came straight down to the ground,” Potter said. “The pain was excruciating.”
Potter, who was diagnosed with osteoporosis at age 48, had been taking the popular osteoporosis drug Fosamax for eight years before her femur literally snapped in two.
Fosamax, one in a class of drugs called bisphosphonates, is supposed to make bones stronger. But now there’s mounting evidence that for some women, taking Fosamax or its generic alendronate for more than five years could cause spontaneous fractures.
“We are seeing people just walking, walking down the steps, patients who are doing low-energy exercise,” said Dr. Kenneth Egol, professor of orthopedic surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Very unusual, the femur is one of the strongest bones in the body.”
Egol said X-rays of some of his patients look more like an injury endured by a car accident than an otherwise minimal fall.
“Over the last 18 months we are seeing this more frequently,” he said.
Sue Heller, 60, of Castle Rock, Colo., had been on Fosamax for almost 10 years. She broke both of her femur bones.
“I’m sure there are a lot of women who have brittle bones right now that maybe are ready to break, and they’re not aware of it,” said Heller. “And my heart aches for them.”
Sales of the popular drug increased when doctors began prescribing it not only to women showing signs of osteoporosis, but also those who were osteopenic, and thus, at risk for the disease. Now some doctors worry that staying on the drug for more than five years can cause some women’s bones to become more brittle.
This is not the first time that many doctors have reported an opposite effect for many people taking the drug. Fosamax has already been linked to severe musculoskeletal pain, as well as to a serious bone-related jaw disease called osteonecrosis.
“In worldwide post-marketing experience with FOSAMAX/FOSAMAX Plus D, rare reports consistent with osteonecrosis of the jaw have been received. Many of these reports lack sufficient clinical details to make definitive assessments and/or are confounded, particularly since a generally accepted definition of ONJ in the general population is unknown,” responded Merck in a written response to the suggested link. “Rare cases of ONJ have also been reported in patients who do not have osteoporosis and who have not taken any bisphosphonate medicines.”
In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration reached out to the pharmaceutical company Merck about the reports of femur fractures. After 16 months, Merck added patients’ reports of femur fractures to the list of possible side effects reported by patients included in the drug’s package insert.
“It took Merck an entire year to respond,” said ABC News senior health and medical editor, Dr. Richard Besser. “Just six words: ‘low energy femoral shaft and subtrochanteric fractures.’”
The FDA has also never made an effort to inform the public or doctors across the country who prescribe bisphosphonates of the possible side effect, said Besser.
Both the FDA and Merck declined ABC News’ request for an interview. The FDA said they are looking into reports of fractures.
“Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of its medicines,” according to a written statement by Merck to ABC News. A causal relationship between Fosamax and these fractures has not been established, according to Merck.
“The drug companies have to recognize when there is a problem, they have to be up front with the public. If there’s a concern, they have to voice it and at least give everybody a fair chance to look at this carefully,” said Dr. Joseph Lane, orthopedic trauma surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.
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Vitamin D Deficiency Becoming an Epidemic
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
There is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency sweeping across our modern world, and it’s an epidemic of such depth and seriousness that it makes the H1N1 swine flu epidemic look like a case of the sniffles by comparison. Vitamin D deficiency is not only alarmingly widespread, it’s also a root cause of many other serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease.
A new study published in the March, 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that a jaw-dropping 59 percent of the population is vitamin D deficient. In addition, nearly 25 percent of the study subjects were found to have extremely low levels of vitamin D.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Richard Kremer at the McGill University Health Center, said “Abnormal levels of vitamin D are associated with a whole spectrum of diseases, including cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune disorders.”
This new study also documents a clear link between vitamin D deficiency and stored body fat. This supports a theory I’ve espoused here on NaturalNews for many years: That sunshine actually promote body fat loss. Vitamin D may be the hormonal mechanism by which this fat loss phenomenon operates.
The research findings on vitamin D, by the way, get even better…
Activator for the immune system
Recent research carried out at the University of Copenhagen has revealed that vitamin D activates the immune system by “arming” T cells to fight off infections.
This new research, led by Professor Carsten Geisler from the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, found that without vitamin D, the immune system’s T cells remain dormant, offering little or no protection against invading microorganisms and viruses. But with vitamin D in the bloodstream, T cells become “armed” and begin seeking out invaders that are then destroyed and carried out of the body.
Vitamin D, in other words, acts a bit like the ignition key to your car: The car won’t run unless you turn the key and ignite the engine. Likewise, your immune system won’t function unless it is biochemically activated with vitamin D. If you’re facing the winter flu season in a state of vitamin D deficiency, your immune system is essentially defenseless against seasonal flu. That’s why all the people who get sick are the ones who live indoors, work indoors and exist in a chronic state of vitamin D deficiency.
That’s also why virtually all the people who died from H1N1 were chronically deficient in vitamin D. They had virtually no immune system protection at all and were thus easy targets for the swine flu.
These findings about vitamin D “arming” the immune system were published in Nature Immunology. Commenting on the findings, the researchers said, “Scientists have known for a long time that vitamin D is important for calcium absorption and the vitamin has also been implicated in diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis, but what we didn’t realize is how crucial vitamin D is for actually activating the immune system — which we know now.” (UK Telegraph, source below).
It seems the CDC and WHO remain utterly ignorant about this research or they would have been recommending vitamin D to fight the recent H1N1 pandemic rather than vaccine shots. Vitamin D would have been a far more effective (and less costly) defense against the pandemic than vaccine shots, especially given that even vaccines don’t work unless there is an immune response, and that immune response requires the presence of vitamin D!
And while vaccine shots have undesirable side effects such as causing severe neurological damage in a small number of vaccine recipients, vitamin D’s only significant “side effect” is that it prevents 77% of all cancers, too.
The common denominator for disease
What’s becoming increasingly clear from all the new research is that vitamin D deficiency may be the common denominator behind our most devastating modern degenerative diseases. Kidney failure patients are almost universally deficient in vitamin D and diabetes patients are usually in the same category. People suffering from cancer almost always demonstrate severe vitamin D deficiency, as do people with osteoporosis and multiple sclerosis.
Click here for the full report
Deforestation Destroyed Ancient Civilization
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The collapse of the ancient Nazca civilization, long attributed to the El Nino weather phenomenon, may have actually been caused by deforestation, according to research conducted by scientists from Cambridge University and the French Institute of Andean Studies, and published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.
“The landscape only became exposed to the catastrophic effects of that El Nino flood once people had inadvertently crossed an ecological threshold,” researcher David Beresford-Jones said.
The Nazca, who inhabited coastal desert areas in what is today Peru, are best known for constructing massive patterns in the desert sand that can only be seen from the air. Their civilization entered an abrupt decline roughly 1,500 years ago.
Researchers have now discovered that much of the Nazca environment was originally covered by a leguminous hardwood tree known as the huarango.
“It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known,” Beresford-Jones says. “This remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree was an important source of food, forage timber and fuel for the local people.”
By examining plant and pollen remains 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) down into the soil, the researchers were able to uncover how huarango forests gave way first to agricultural land and then to desert.
“At the bottom of the profile there is a lot of huarango pollen and little evidence of human impact,” researcher Alex Chepstow-Lusty said. “Then, at 80 cm deep, maize pollen becomes common [and huarango pollen declines]. Then suddenly corresponding with the El Nino event at AD500 or shortly afterwards … this landscape is now the desert seen today.”
The researchers believe that with the huarango forests in place, El Nino floods were actually beneficial, aquifer-replenishing events. Once the trees were gone, the floods washed away topsoil and destroyed agricultural land.
“Human induced gradual change is just as important to the full story of Nazca collapse as the major climatic impacts that eventually precipitated them,” Beresford-Jones said.
Click here for the full report
Russia Banning U.S. Chicken
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By E. Huff
Beginning on January 1, 2010, Russia has officially banned imported poultry products from countries that use chlorine in their processing methods. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will no longer allow chicken imports from the U.S. because the chlorine baths used to sanitize chickens do not meet Russian food safety standards.
Since it comes from Russia, many may dismiss the ban as being politically charged with no scientific validity. However many nations around the world, including all within the European Union, have banned poultry imports from chlorine-using countries because of the dangers posed by the chemical. These countries use different methods to disinfect meat, including air chilling and electrolyzed water treatments, which do not expose the meat to harmful chemicals.
Putin expressed that Russia is working to become poultry self-sufficient by the year 2015 but, until then, will import only from nations that do not use chlorine in meat processing. Each year, the import quota will be dropped until, eventually, all chicken will be domestically raised in Russia.
When the issue first surfaced back in 2008, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Export Council tried to persuade Russia that the chlorine treatment methods used on chicken are both safe and effective. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the hypochlorus chemical used, which is an active form of chlorine, is an effective antimicrobial.
Rather than reconsider the safety of its own treatment methods, U.S. regulators tried to use rhetoric to convince Russia to accept U.S. imports and failed miserably. Russia refused to hear any of it, ending $825 million worth of U.S. chicken imports into its country.
The truth about chlorine chicken baths is that not only are they not truly effective but they expose people to a steady stream of toxic chlorine every time they consume chicken. Chlorine is known to increase cancer risk and cause other serious problems including respiratory illness and heart disease. Like other environmental halogens, chlorine contributes to thyroid dysfunction as well.
The levels of chlorine used in chicken baths, which average somewhere between 20 and 50 parts per million (ppm), do not always kill all the pathogens present. According to a European Consumers’ Organization study conducted in 2007, 83 percent of U.S. chicken that had been treated in chlorine baths still contained harmful pathogens. The bath essentially becomes a pathogen cesspool that contaminates all the other chickens that are submerged in it.
It is no wonder that Russia, the E.U., and a growing list of nations around the world are refusing chlorinated U.S. chicken.
Click here for the full report
Sugar and Salt Infiltrate “Healthy” Snacks
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Many children’s snacks marketed as healthy alternatives are actually full of unhealthy ingredients like sugar, salt and fat, according to an analysis conducted by the consumer watchdog organization Which?.
“Parents should be able to pick out healthy products for their kids’ lunchboxes, but what you see isn’t always what you get,” said the group’s Martyn Hocking.
“Many [products] declare that they don’t contain additives, but don’t mention they’re also full of salt or sugar – giving the impression they’re healthier than they are,” the report reads.
For example, while Dairylea Lunchables Ham ‘n’ Cheese Crackers are advertised as providing half of the recommended daily calcium for a child, nowhere on the label or in promotional materials does the company acknowledge that the product is high in fat, saturated fat and salt — containing 1.8 grams of the maximum daily recommended 3 grams of the latter.
The report also singles out Kellogg’s Frosties Cereal and Milk bars, which the company promotes by saying, “”Fortified with vitamins, iron and calcium, now you can give your kids a great tasting snack that you can be sure won’t come back from school in the lunchbox!” Yet the company does not explain that the bars contain seven different sugar ingredients and thus are nearly one-third sugar by weight.
Other supposedly healthy products that are actually high in sugar include Robinson’s Fruit Shoot orange juice drinks, with nearly five teaspoons (23 grams) or sugar in a single 200 milliliter bottle; Fruit Factory fruit strings, with 13.7 grams of sugar in a 24 gram product; and Munch Bunch Double Up fromage frais, which contain only 2.25 grams of fruit puree but more than two teaspoons (12.4 grams) of sugar.
“The best way to beat the lunchbox baddies is by checking the nutrition and ingredient information,” Hocking said. “We’d also like to see the rules on health and nutrition claims made tougher, so there’s less confusion on the supermarket shelves.”
Click here for the full report
What Chemicals Are Turning Boys Into Girls?
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The government of Denmark has released a 326-page report affirming that endocrine disrupting chemicals are probably continuing to the birth of fewer males and the “feminization” of existing ones.
The report centers on chemicals like PVC, flame retardants, phthalates, dioxins, PCBs and bisphenol-A, all of which mimic the action of estrogen in the body. The researchers concluded that due to the prevalence of these chemicals, children could easily be exposed to high enough levels to place them at “critical risk” of harm.
The chemicals have been blamed for falling sperm counts among men worldwide, and their full effects remain unknown. A study by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, found that male children who had been exposed to PCBs and dioxins while in the womb were more likely to dress up in female clothes and play with dolls than boys who had not been. Other research has documented a connection between prenatal phthalate exposure and “feminization” of male genitals, including smaller penises.
Evidence is increasingly emerging that estrogen mimics might also be responsible for a puzzling phenomenon: fewer boys are being born than ever before. Typically, 106 male children are born for every 100 females in most populations. In recent years, however, this distribution has been shifting in favor of females, with endocrine disruptors a likely culprit.
For example, a Canadian Inuit community living on Lake Huron and surrounded by chemical factories produces two girls for every boy born. Similar phenomena have been observed in contaminated communities in Brazil, Israel, Italy, Taiwan and the Arctic Circle, as well as among workers in Russian pesticide factories.
Many hormone-mimicking chemicals build up in the body and resist environmental degradation, meaning that they are now widely distributed across the planet.
“There is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families,” the environmental group WWF said.
Click here for the full report
New Treatments for Arthritis: Bee Stings
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By E. Huff
A bee sting is an unpleasant experience that undoubtedly everyone would choose to avoid if given the choice. However a growing number of people are choosing to be stung by bees in an alternative form of illness treatment called apitherapy. Apitherapy contends that bee venom holds therapeutic value in treating serious illness and that it is a viable alternative to dangerous pharmaceutical drugs that often do not work and have harmful side effects.
Apitherapy, a traditional folk remedy that has been used in many other countries for centuries, takes advantage of the healing power contained in honeybee venom which helps to alleviate serious conditions like multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and lupus. According to 51-year-old Reyah Carlson of Vermont, a proponent of apitherapy, bee venom helped to treat her Lyme Disease.
Carlson recently spoke at the North American Beekeepers Conference in Orlando where she spoke of the benefits of apitherapy. She regularly travels around the world telling people about the alternative treatment and informing them about how it works to treat disease.
Bee venom contains about 40 different healing components, one of which is melittin, a compound identified in a 2009 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts study as an anti-inflammatory and anti-arthritic element. According to Carlson, melittin and the other components work together to boost immunity and quicken the healing process.
Besides the two percent of the U.S. population that is allergic to bees, most people stand to benefit from apitherapy treatment. While it may not necessarily cure all conditions, the venom can at least keep diseases at bay without imposing harmful side effects like drugs do. Aside from the temporary pain of the sting itself, there are virtually no other negative side effects from apitherapy.
Many medical professional refuse to acknowledge the benefits of apitherapy. Despite the roughly 65,000 Americans who use and benefit from bee sting therapy, the medical establishment largely rejects it as a viable treatment option. According to Carlson, many doctors believe it is dangerous and could kill people.
Because reactions from bee stings can vary from person to person, Carlson always carries around antihistamines for minor reactions as well as epinephrine for those who may go into anaphylactic shock. Typically no severe reaction should happen in a healthy person who is not allergic to bee stings, but Carlson keeps a safety kit on hand as a precautionary measure and advises others who use or administer the therapy to do so as well.
Click here for the full report
The True Price of Health Care Spending
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The U.S. healthcare system loses between $505 and $850 billion a year to mistakes, inefficiency and fraud, according to a report by Thomson Reuters. This amounts to one-third of all national healthcare spending.
“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars,” the report says.
According to the report, unnecessary medical procedures and treatments — including antibiotic overuse and superfluous tests — account for 37 percent of all wasted spending, $200 to $300 billion per year. Fraud — including false Medicare claims and kickbacks for referrals or prescriptions — accounts for another 22 percent, as much as $200 billion a year. Medical errors are responsible for 11 percent of excess spending, or $50 to $100 billion yearly. Preventable health problems, such as diabetes, cost the healthcare system $30 to $50 billion per year.
One of the easiest areas to repair might be administrative inefficiency, which accounts for a full 18 percent of medical overspending.
“The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada,” the report says. “American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada.”
Administrative inefficiency can also lead to other wasteful practices.
“It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient’s record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed,” the report says.
Although the United States has the highest per capita healthcare spending and spends a higher proportion of its GDP on healthcare than any other nation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (a group of predominantly high income Western democracies), it has the highest rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and neonatal death in the developed world, as well as the unhealthiest population.
Click here for the full report
Weight Watchers Partnering With McDonald’s
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Weight Watchers has now officially endorsed Chicken McNuggets as a “healthy meal” in New Zealand, where McDonald’s restaurants will begin carrying the Weight Watchers logo on several menu items. This bizarre and inexplicable decision has now made Weight Watchers the laughing stock of the health world where nutrition and weight loss experts normally don’t use “McDonald’s fast food” and “weight loss” in the same sentence.
As The Guardian reports, “As part of the deal, which the company says is the first of its kind in the world, McDonald’s will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards and Weight Watchers will promote McDonald’s to dieters.”
Nutritionists, not surprisingly, were shocked at the announcement. The idea of eating at McDonald’s to lose weight seems a bit ridiculous, and anyone who believes that eating Chicken McNuggets will cause you to lose weight is arguably one nugget short of a Happy Meal. Sometimes you just have to point out the stupidity of these things, even at the risk of offending someone who has convinced themselves that eating more Chicken McNuggets is their ticket to a slim, fit and sexy body.
Watch your weight balloon!
Weight Watchers, by the way, never actually claims that eating the foods they endorse will cause you to lose weight. If you examine it carefully, even their name isn’t really about weight loss. It’s about weight watching… as in, watch your weight grow larger by the day…
A “weight watch” is sort of like a “tornado watch” or a “tsunami watch.” You keep your eyes peeled and wait for something disastrous to happen — such as ballooning to 300 pounds while engaging in unhealthy eating McHabits based on snarfing down meat parts from factory-farmed cows raised in bovine concentration camps that might more accurately be called “Cowschwitz.”
If Weight Watchers is going to endorse McNuggets, then why not just endorse the entire McDonald’s menu and throw the logo behind Big Macs and ice cream shakes, too? It’s not like Weight Watchers is trying to “protect its reputation” by not crossing a line, you know. Once you’ve endorsed McDonald’s as “healthy” food, that line is no longer anywhere in sight.
Of course, McDonald’s products merely join a long list of questionable foods marketed under the “Weight Watchers” brand name — a brand that in my opinion has discovered great commercial success in selling the false hope of weight loss to clueless consumers who are unwilling to read ingredients lists on food labels.
Not coincidentally, Weight Watchers has now become the “McDonald’s” of the weight loss industry — and industry filled with so many scams and shams that the idea of eating Chicken McNuggets to lose weight doesn’t even seem that strange to many people.
We live in a world where corporate promotional lies are disgusting at best, and criminal at worst. We’re told that psychiatric drugs will make you happy, that chemotherapy will make you healthy and that eating at McDonald’s will make you lose weight. We’re told that sugary junk drinks will give you “energy”, that toxic vaccines are necessary for your immune system to work correctly and that buying silly pink-ribbon products will somehow cure cancer.
At the same time, we’re told that vitamins are dangerous, that sunlight causes cancer and that there’s no such thing as a cure for type-2 diabetes. Everything that’s good for you is discredited as bad while everything that’s toxic is hyped up as “healthy.”
I suppose in light of the corporate-sponsored sick-care insanity that passes for medical advice these days, the idea that eating at McDonald’s will make you lose weight doesn’t seem as insane as it really should.
But that doesn’t make it any more true.
In a world gone mad with dietary misinformation touting fictional foods, insanity can now be marketed to the intoxicated mainstream as if it somehow made sense.
… and people swallow it.
Click here for the full report
Study Shows Americans are Being Overtreated
March 15, 2010
Associated Press
By Lindsey Tanner
CHICAGO — Too much cancer screening, too many heart tests, too many cesarean sections. A spate of recent reports suggests that many Americans are being overtreated. Maybe even President Barack Obama, champion of an overhaul and cost-cutting of the health care system.
Is it doctors practicing defensive medicine? Or are patients so accustomed to a culture of medical technology that they insist on extensive tests and treatments?
A combination of both is at work, but new evidence and updated guidelines are recommending a step back and more thorough doctor-patient talks about risks and benefits of screening tests.
Americans, including the commander in chief, need to realize that “more care is not necessarily better care,” wrote cardiologist Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine. She was commenting on Obama’s recent physical.
His exam included prostate cancer screening and a virtual colonoscopy. The PSA test for prostate cancer is not routinely recommended for any age and colon screening is not routinely recommended for patients younger than 50. Obama is 48. A White House spokesman noted that earlier colon cancer screening is sometimes recommended for high-risk groups, such as African-Americans.
Doctors disagree on whether a virtual colonoscopy is the best method. But it’s less invasive than the traditional procedure and doesn’t require sedation — or the possible temporary transfer of presidential power, the White House said.
Yet Redberg, a doctor with expertise in health policy, takes issue with that test and a heart scan to look for calcium deposits in the president’s arteries. She said the calcium check isn’t recommended for low-risk men like Obama.
And the colon exam exposed him to radiation “while likely providing no benefit to his care,” she wrote in an editorial in the medical journal. Obama’s experience “is multiplied many times over” at a huge financial cost to society, and to patients exposed to potential harms but no benefits.
“People have come to equate tests with good care and prevention,” said Redberg, of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. “Prevention is all the things your mother told you — eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, don’t smoke — and we’ve made it into getting a new test.”
This week alone, a New England Journal of Medicine study suggested that too many patients are getting angiograms — invasive imaging tests for heart disease — who don’t really need them; and specialists convened by the National Institutes of Health said doctors are too often demanding repeat cesarean deliveries for pregnant women after a first C-section.
Last week, the American Cancer Society cast more doubt on routine PSA tests for prostate cancer. And a few months ago, other groups recommended against routine mammograms for women in their 40s, and for fewer Pap tests looking for cervical cancer.
Experts dispute how much routine cancer screening saves lives. It also sometimes detects cancers that are too slow-growing to cause harm, or has false-positive results leading to invasive but needless procedures — and some risks. Treatment for prostate cancer that may be too slow-growing to be life-threatening can mean incontinence and impotence. Angiograms carry a slight risk for stroke or heart attack.
Not all doctors and advocacy groups agree with the criticism of screening. Many argue that it can improve survival chances and that saving even a few lives is worth the cost of routinely testing tens of thousands of people.
Dr. Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins University patient safety expert, said routine testing is often based on bad science, or on guidelines that quickly become outdated as new science emerges.
The recent shift in focus reflects evolving research on the benefits and risks of screening.
While some patients clearly do benefit from screening, others clearly do not, said Dr. Richard Wender, former president of the American Cancer Society.
These include very old patients, who may unrealistically fear cancer and demand a screening test, when their risks are far higher of dying from something else, Wender said.
“Sometimes it’s kind of the path of least resistance just to order the test,” he said.
Doctors also often order tests or procedures to protect themselves against lawsuits — so-called defensive medicine — and also because the fee-for-service system compensates them for it, said Dr. Gilbert Welch, a Dartmouth University internist and health outcomes researcher.
Some doctors think “it’s always a good thing to look for things to be wrong,” Welch said. It also has become much easier to order tests — with the click of a mouse instead of filling out forms, and both can lead to overuse, he said.
While many patients also demand routine tests, they’re often bolstered by advertisements, medical information online — and by doctors, too, Welch said.
“To some extent we’ve taught them to demand these things,” he said. “We’ve systematically exaggerated the benefits of early diagnosis,” which doesn’t always improve survival. “We don’t always tell people there might actually be downsides” to testing.
Jennifer Traig, an Ann Arbor, Mich., author of a book about hypochondria, says patients like her often think, “I’m getting better care if we’re checking for more things.”
Traig has had many costly high-tech tests, including an MRI and several heart-imaging tests, for symptoms that turned out to be nothing. She thinks doctors were right to order those tests, but that counseling could have prevented her from “wasting resources” and getting tests it turned out she didn’t need.
The new guidance from the cancer society last week on PSA testing, echoing others’ advice on mammograms, is for doctors and patients to thoroughly discuss testing, including a patient’s individual disease risks, general pros and cons of testing and possible harms it may cause.
Dr. Bruce Minsky, a University of Chicago cancer specialist who still favors routine mammograms for women in their 40s, said that emphasis is a positive trend.
“That to me is one of the greatest benefits,” he said. “It enhances that communication between the physician and patient.”
