January 26th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Health Tips, Opinion
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The February issue of Prevention magazine has an article entitled “Surprising Faces of Heart Attack” profiling “three women (who) didn’t think they were at high risk. Their stories are proof that you could be in danger without even knowing it.” No, their stories are not proof of that.
The story is about three women in their 40s. The story varyingly states that the three should have had the following screening tests:
— Advanced cholesterol test, carotid intimal medial thickness test ( CIMT)
— Advanced cholesterol test and stress echocardiography
— Cardiac calcium scoring and CIMT
There’s an accompanying piece: “7 Tests You’re Not Having That Could Save Your Life.”
I asked one of our HealthNewsReview.org medical editors, Harold Demonaco, director of the Innovation Support Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital, to review the two pieces. As his day-job title suggests, he deals with review of the evidence for new and emerging healthcare technologies. He wrote:
The section “7 Tests you are not having that could save your life” states: “If you have not had these cutting edge screenings, put this magazine down and call your doctor. Now.”
Wow. While much of the information is correct, it is the context that is disturbing. Suggesting that these tests are essential in everyone is a bit over the top. Some of the information provided for each test is basically correct. However in some cases the recommendations go well beyond national guidelines.
The major issue here is the tacit assumption that tests are infallible, without any downsides and are always a good thing. That is simply not the case. So who should get these tests? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 12th, 2011 by PJSkerrett in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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Here’s an important equation that all of us — doctors include — should know about healthcare, but don’t:
More ≠ Better
“More does not equal better” applies to diagnostic procedures, screening tests meant to identify problems before they appear, medications, dietary supplements, and just about every aspect of medicine.
That scenario is spelled out in alarming detail in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Clinicians at the Cleveland Clinic describe the case of a 52-year-old woman who went to her community hospital because she had been having chest pain for two days. She wasn’t having symptoms of a heart attack, such as shortness of breath, unexplained nausea, or a cold sweat, and her electrocardiogram and other tests were fine. The woman’s doctors concluded that her chest pain was probably due to a muscle she had pulled or strained during her recently begun exercise program to lose weight.
To “reassure her” that she wasn’t having a heart attack, the emergency department team recommended she have a CT scan of her heart. This noninvasive procedure can spot narrowings in coronary arteries and other problems that can interfere with blood flow to the heart. When it showed a suspicious area in her left anterior descending artery (a key artery nourishing the heart), she underwent a coronary angiogram. This involves inserting a thin wire called a catheter into a blood vessel in the groin and deftly maneuvering it into the heart. Once in place, equipment on the catheter is used to make pictures of blood flow through the coronary arteries. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
January 3rd, 2011 by Michael Kirsch, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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The medical profession’s ability to diagnose far exceeds its ability to effectively treat the conditions discovered. Consider arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, strokes, emphysema, and many cancers.
When a physician orders a diagnostic test, ideally it should be to answer a specific question, rather than a buckshot approach. A chest X-ray is not ordered because a patient has a cough. It should be done because the test has a reasonable chance of yielding information that would change the physician’s advice. If the doctor was going to prescribe an antibiotic anyway, then why order the chest X-ray?
Physicians and patients should ask before a test is performed if the information is likely to change the medical management. In other words, is a test being ordered because physicians want to know or because we really need to know the results?
Does every patient with a heart murmur, for example, need an echocardiogram, even though this test would be easy to justify to patients and to insurance companies? If the test won’t change anything, then it costs dollars and makes no sense. Spine X-rays for acute back strains are an example of a radiologic reflex. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at MD Whistleblower*
January 3rd, 2011 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Research
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I’ve written in the past that more medicine and tests do not necessarily reflect better care.
There is no test that is 100 percent specific or sensitive. That means tests may be positive, when, in fact, there is no disease (“false positive”), or tests may be negative in the presence of disease (“false negative”).
It’s the latter that often gets the most media attention, often trumpeted as missed diagnoses. But false positives can be just as dangerous. Consider this frightening case report from the Archives of Internal Medicine:
A 52-year-old woman presented to a community hospital with atypical chest pain. Her low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein levels were not elevated. She underwent cardiac computed tomography angiography, which showed both calcified and noncalcified coronary plaques in several locations. Her physicians subsequently performed coronary angiography, which was complicated by dissection of the left main coronary artery, requiring emergency coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Her subsequent clinical course was complicated, but eventually she required orthotropic heart transplantation for refractory heart failure. This case illustrates the hazards of the inappropriate use of cardiac computed tomography angiography in low-risk patients and emphasizes the need for restraint in applying this new technology to the evaluation of patients with atypical chest pain. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
December 28th, 2010 by GruntDoc in Better Health Network, Opinion
1 Comment »
Via Kaiser Health News:
On a recent Friday night at the Boston Children’s Hospital ER, Dr. Fabienne Bourgeois was having difficulty treating a 17-year-old boy with a heart problem. The teen had transferred in from another hospital, where he had already had an initial work-up — including a chest X-ray and an EKG to check the heart’s electrical activity. But by the time he reached pediatrician Bourgeois, she had no access to those records so she gave him another EKG and chest X-ray. He was on multiple medications, and gave her a list of them. But his list differed from the one his mother gave doctors, neither of which matched the list his previous hospital had sent along.
This is excellent advice. Every ED has seen a patient, probably today, with “they saw me at the ER across town, but they didn’t do anything and I’m still sick.” While it makes some sense not to return to a restaurant that gave you a meal that wasn’t to your tastes, medicine is quite different.
If a patient gives me this history, I now have a blank slate, and need to essentially start at zero with them. So, I will do the correct workup to exclude the life threats based on the history and physical exam, which may be exactly the tests they had yesterday. I’m not going to assume they did the same tests, or that they were normal. It’s the standard of care at this time, and I have very, very few alternatives. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
