Posted April 1st. Don’t trust the internet or anything you read on April Fools day. Edit: apparently not a joke! See below for study link.
It's not an April fools, the study [0] is from 9th of June 2014.
Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
71–80 of 269 posts
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#72You need to remember that health care in the US is a business whose secondary function is to cure disease
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brought to you by some doctors in Denmark, a country with socialized healthcare. Can we cut the cynicism for one minute to at least check the source?
That means nothing. Studies can be funded from anywhere.
So funding is a problem when you think it's privately funded, but funding doesn't matter when it turns out that's not the case? Please.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#74I have a personal example of this. My father died largely because of his annual physical. He hated doctors, became nervous around them and thus expressed hypertension in-office. He did not have material hypertension but did defer to his physician. Over the long term, despite my best efforts, this killed him. His blood pressure medication regime was poorly managed and severely impacted his quality of life. He eventual…
I was listening to Peter Attia on some podcast and he says to essentially throw out any BP reading that didn't occur after sitting down for five minutes. In his practice they have patients measure many times a day for multiple weeks just to get a baseline point to work from. More and more i find that, at least in America, if you're talking to a GP you're just talking to a human interface of insurance approved treatme…
Dr. Attia also shared his personal experience similar to @sklargh's grandfather where he suffered a head injury after fainting while standing up from bed. High blood pressure can kill you over years, but excessive low blood pressure can kill you tomorrow.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was listening to Peter Attia on some podcast and he says to essentially throw out any BP reading that didn't occur after sitting down for five minutes. In his practice they have patients measure many times a day for multiple weeks just to get a baseline point to work from. More and more i find that, at least in America, if you're talking to a GP you're just talking to a human interface of insurance approved treatme…
That’s a great way to articulate the problem. Imho, a brilliant solution is direct primary care. For $80/mo, I have access to a dr that works for me, and not my insurance company. Absolute game changer in that he has a bias toward understanding and optimizing rather than gaming insurance metrics to be rated as a double-plus preferred provider or whatever. Also gets my lab work done at a fraction of what my insurance…
Is this the same thing as concierge medicine? I’m interested but it seems quite expensive. 80$ a month seems much lower than normal.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a great way to articulate the problem. Imho, a brilliant solution is direct primary care. For $80/mo, I have access to a dr that works for me, and not my insurance company. Absolute game changer in that he has a bias toward understanding and optimizing rather than gaming insurance metrics to be rated as a double-plus preferred provider or whatever. Also gets my lab work done at a fraction of what my insurance…
Is this the same thing as concierge medicine? I’m interested but it seems quite expensive. 80$ a month seems much lower than normal.
I honestly don’t know if ‘concierge medicine’ is a different thing, but from what it sounds like and my own experience with direct primary care they sound equivalent. Possibly different by cost or target demographic.
A rose by any other name, and all that.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#77Posted April 1st. Don’t trust the internet or anything you read on April Fools day. Edit: apparently not a joke! See below for study link.
Not every country celebrates All Fools' Day on April 1st
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cholesterol numbers are but guides/risk factors on your health risk. They do not necessarily mean that you will suffer from atherosclerosis the precursor to heart disease.
That was my argument to my primary care doctor. He then arranged for a CT scan of my arteries that showed there was significant blockage. I'm now on statins for the rest of my life to keep cholesterol in the blood down and hopefully keep the arteries from getting completely blocked.
And your primary care physician did the correct thing which was to scan your arteries for damage. Also statins work by helping over a long period of time - so chances are if you are good with the sides (if you have sides) and you have a bunch of risk factors makes a lot of sense. Not a physician FWIW.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#79There's a similar phenomenon when you look at fetal heart monitoring for otherwise healthy pregnant women going into labour. The two options are continuous monitoring, where the monitor is left in place for the entire hospital stay, and periodic monitoring, where a nurse installs it, takes a reading, and removes it about once an hour. Common sense would dictate that negative outcomes are reduced with continuous monit…
A lot of negative comments on this and there are no references provided, however some human traits are well-understood:
* people irrationally tend to add rather than remove complexity to solve problems
* experts' decision accuracy improves faster with more information than their personal evaluation of / comfort with those decisions
* people asked to evaluate the contents of a picture repeatedly while being shown increasingly faithful renderings who are shown worse (unusable) renderings of the picture to begin with are slower to reach an accurate evaluation overall
As a general observation on medical care, Team USA has been slow to adopt the practice of weighing absorbent materials during procedures including childbirth to measure blood / fluid loss and this has had measurable, negative outcomes for patients.
Re: Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this the same thing as concierge medicine? I’m interested but it seems quite expensive. 80$ a month seems much lower than normal.
I honestly don’t know if ‘concierge medicine’ is a different thing, but from what it sounds like and my own experience with direct primary care they sound equivalent. Possibly different by cost or target demographic. A rose by any other name, and all that.
We have DPC, and it's amazing. We pay $250/month for a family of 4. Some places charge less, but then also charge you for each time you see the doctor. Ours is all inclusive except for any in office incidentals - like lab work.
It's truly amazing. Our doctor knows us all well, can get responses to email or text within just a few minutes, generally same day appointments, or next day if she's really busy. Most things we don't even need to go in for - I did a recent international trip, and she just ordered me all of the needed travel medications without having to stop in.