Here’s how it works: the
more you look, the more you find, the more you find, the more you treat, often even if what you find doesn’t need treatment. That, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, is one of the problems with the very lucrative business of sports medicine, and MRI’s, which at one academic medical center cost more than $1,700 for a knee scan, are the preferred method of looking. The Times reports that when, in an effort to test the overtreatment hypothesis, one sports medicine orthopedist ran MRIs on the shoulders of 31 perfectly healthy professional pitchers, he found abnormal shoulder cartilage in 90 percent of them and abnormal rotator cuff tendons in 87 percent. Such evidence, the doc says, is a great excuse to operate. Christopher DiGiovanni, a professor of orthopedics and a sports medicine specialist at Brown University, tells the paper that “It is very rare for an M.R.I. to come back with the words ‘normal study. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve seen it.†The Times reports that DiGiovanni recently conducted a study with foot and ankle patients, looking back at 221 consecutive patients over a three-month period, 201 of whom did not have fractures. More than 15 percent arrived with M.R.I.’s obtained by doctors they had seen before coming to DiGiovanni, who found that nearly 90 percent of those scans were unnecessary and half had interpretations that either made no difference to the patient’s diagnosis or were at odds with the diagnosis. Read more in the New York Times.
Health, fitness and lifestyle tips for people over 50 who still like to play hard
Saturday, May 31, 2025
It seems the more “socialized” our medical
system becoomes, the more studies we see that
give reason to justify why insurers should NOT
pay for screenings desired by patients and recommended by their doctors.
It’s a matter of perspective….
One is from the top looking at costs and
benefits overall to society at large,
The other is from the bottom from an individual
perspective looking at personal risks and
making personal choice of treatments.
You have no idea how #$&&@! this garbage makes me.
My knee pain is not imaginary.
The freaking docs will not do the NECESSARY MRI.