By the time a lung cancer is seen on an X-ray it is almost always too widespread to be operated on. Hence, the only chance for a cure is finding it before it has spread via a screening CT scan…
My patients want to know if they have cancer as early in the process as possible, and they want a plan to treat it. They don’t want to have to rely on mathematical projections or statistics about “hypothetical” death rates.
Recent studies, which Siegel mentions, suggest that lung cancer screening has no benefits, on average. But, he argues, his patients still want it.
This form of screening clearly falls into what in my book I call a “gray area,” meaning medical procedures that are not clearly cost-effective. Some patients may want it, but it is not absolutely necessary.
I have no problem with giving patients what they want, provided that they are paying out of pocket. But when consumers are insulated from the cost, this sort of premium, gray-area medicine is, in my view, the fundamental source of our problems in health care finance.
READER COMMENTS
Me
Mar 20 2007 at 3:47pm
Another example of this gray area: my friend works at a children’s hospital where frantic parents demand all sorts of unnecessary tests because they saw it on TV or the Internet. The doctors can’t argue with them, and they are reimbursed by insurance anyway. So my friend claims that his hospital wastes lots of time and money placating bawling mothers.
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