Seeking medical help is a decision of many to stop or prevent an illness. That’s what many people think. But what if one medical checkup, which you think can help can snowball to into a “cascade” of tests that can do more harm than good, do you think it’s still worth it? Are your doctors really helping you have better health or worse?
A story of a woman that was shared online got attention of many. It was about her medical check up which she thought could help, but instead, did the other way around. If you are keen to know more about her story, click on the Next Page button.
Have you ever had the same experience when you seek medical help, with the aim of having better health, and yet you became more ill? Or, do you know someone whose health became worse after undergoing a medical treatment?
Below is an excerpt of an article posted at WashingtonPost.com where a woman had one medical check up and then snowballed into a ‘cascade’ of tests, causing more harm than good:
“If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” Laura Numeroff’s classic children’s book, is a cautionary tale about the downstream consequences of a single, seemingly innocuous decision. You gave the mouse the cookie. Naturally, he wanted a glass of milk to go with it. Before long, the mouse was moving in and sharing your Netflix password.
This pattern is familiar to many of us, whether as doctors or as patients: A medical test spurs a “cascade” of phone calls, office visits, tests and treatments, each a logical, even inevitable, progression from the one before.
In a sense, this is how medical testing is supposed to work. But no test is perfect and every test has trade-offs — including false positives and incidental findings (results you weren’t looking for and are often better off not knowing). Some tests (like Lily’s) we even know to be low-value — meaning they have at best minimal benefit in a given situation.
And so the harms from a cascade — such as cost, time, stress, pain from unnecessary biopsies, and overdiagnosis — can outweigh any benefits, especially when the cascade stems from an unexpected finding or when that initial test wasn’t needed in the first place.
There you have it.
To read the full story, visit the link below:
How one medical checkup can snowball into a ‘cascade’ of tests, causing more harm than good
A lot of factors can make a person sick. So, take good care of your health. Eat healthy and practice a healthier lifestyle.
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