March 12, 2010 at 5:27 PM

Experts say U.S. doctors overtesting, overtreating

By LINDSEY TANNER

CHICAGO — Too much cancer screening, too many heart tests, too many cesarean sections. A spate of recent reports suggest that too many Americans — maybe even President Obama — are being overtreated.

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 now new evidence and guidelines are recommending a step back and more thorough doctor-patient conversations about risks and benefits.

As a medical journal editorial said this week about Obama's recent checkup, Americans including the commander in chief need to realize that "more care is not necessarily better care."

Obama's 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. (PSA stands for prostate-specific antigen screening).

Earlier colon-cancer screening is sometimes recommended for high-risk groups — which a White House spokesman noted includes blacks. Doctors disagree on whether a virtual colonoscopy is the best method. But it's less invasive than traditional colonoscopies and doesn't require sedation — or the possible temporary transfer of presidential power, the White House said.

The colon exam exposed him to radiation "while likely providing no benefit to his care," Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine, wrote in an online editorial. "People have come to equate tests with good care and prevention," Redberg, a cardiologist with the University of California, San Francisco, said in an interview Thursday. "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.

Experts dispute how much routine cancer screening saves lives.

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.

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.

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.

While many patients also demand routine tests, they're often bolstered by advertisements, medical information online — and by doctors, too, Welch said.

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.

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