According to the Archives of Family Medicine, for years medical doctors have been performing numerous tests on patients, especially those covered by insurance, when many of those tests may have been unnecessary.

The article describes several potential risks of screening tests with controversial benefits, including:

• Reliance on screening tests before the effectiveness of the testing procedures has been proven by adequate research.
• The patient can get the wrong idea that a test can reduce the patient’s risk of disease or illness to zero, possibly leading them to make uninformed medical decisions.
• Inaccurate, false positive test results which can cause profound anxiety for the patient and require additional testing that can be increasingly invasive, costly and in the end unnecessary.

The researchers claim that doctors often provide controversial screening tests because they fear a future lawsuit by a patient who later develops a disease.

In addition, patients request a test because they read an article about it in a magazine, or found out that their insurance company will pay for it.

Rather than educate patients about the risks involved, many doctors simply give the test upon demand – and charge patients for them.

The article suggests the ethical approach would be the physician explaining that tests with controversial benefits are unlikely to be helpful.

SOURCE: Archives of Family Medicine, Oct. 17, 1997 as reported in Health Watch Newsletter