Very interesting article and the conclusion can likely be broadly applied. Conflicts of interest abound in medical care. Hospitals get free formula for distributing bags with samples to mothers (research proven to reduce breastfeeding duration hence formula consumption). Associations of physicians get funding for conferences, offices for lunches and of course the ubiquitous free pill samples causing more prescriptions of newest and NON generic available meds that often are no better than the old version.
I see what they're getting at, but surely, the point of a scan is to confirm or refute a diagnosis - so the scans that come back clear can be as useful in some cases as the ones that don't, because they narrow down what's wrong with the patient. Which is to say that they may not be unecessary just because they don't detect a problem - eliminating that particular thing from the possibilities can be useful too.
But they make a good point about the owners coming up with twice as many normals but same number of problems. Docs shouldn't jump to scan for everyone, there are cheaper and less dangerous (depending on the type of scan if radiation is involved) ways to initially screen problems. It sounds like "owners" skip right to scans more often than non owners while still diagnosing the same percentage of actual problems.
I wonder if other doctors would also go directly to scans if they had access to the equipment more readily? Not that it would be a good thing necessarily.
Where I live, the equipment is owned by the hospitals, not the individual doctors. There are usually long wait-lists to get any kind of scan -- CT, PET, MRI, etc. Hospitals have to do lots of fundraising in order to be able to buy the scanners in the first place. They make money by allowing veterinarians to use the equipment when it's not being used for the human patients. So I don't think this applies here in B.C., at least.
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I wonder if other doctors would also go directly to scans if they had access to the equipment more readily? Not that it would be a good thing necessarily.
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