Well.. I don't know. Early detected illness is usually much more easily treated and has much less serious effects.
When I read this counterargument:
> Rothberg, the Cleveland Clinic physician, wrote a journal article about his father's experience a decade ago, when an annual checkup triggered a number of follow-up tests that cost $50,000 and ended up doing more harm than good.
Well, yeah... Not every country has a crazy overpriced healthcare system like the US where minor problems cost thousands. Also this sounds very much like a 'worst-case example'.
Here in Spain everything is free. Yes, the state pays for it, but the state also pays for treatments that will be more expensive when things get out of hand. And a yearly check is pretty standard and even required by employers. It has happened twice that they found a problem in my blood check. Both cases it was nothing but if it had been, knowing it early could have saved my life.
> In the physical, the doctor used his hands to examine the patient’s stomach. He thought the aorta felt a bit enlarged there and might be an abdominal aortic aneurysm. This led to a cascade of tests — even though the patient turned out not to have an aneurysm — and during one, he nearly bled to death.
Yes medical tests can go wrong. But a scan would have been a much safer option here than just to go poking around.
> This means that in the midst of a primary care shortage in the United States, doctors are spending several hours on visits that evidence suggests are a waste of time and could be harmful.
A primary care shortage should be fixed. Not used as a reason to not do checks. Especially in older people cancer is one of leading causes of death.
This sounds like you've missed the point entirely.
> It has happened twice that they found a problem in my blood check. Both cases it was nothing but if it had been, knowing it early could have saved my life.
The point of the movement as I understand it is that this is actually a pretty significant problem. Extra checks due to "possible problems" aren't free - it's always paid for by somebody, and even if that isn't your wallet directly, it still take up time, inconvenience, and usually physical discomfort. Some have pretty significant risk of complications. Often, nothing is found or what was suspected to have been an issue wouldn't have affected the patient's quality of life. Exactly where the line should be drawn is debatable, but the point is it's not necessarily a good thing to aggressively find and investigate all "possible problems".
People really think annual physicals ought to help, for all the reasons you listed. But they've been studied extensively in empirical trials, and they just don't; not everything that seems like it ought to work actually does. (Just like how the Earth feels solid, flat, and stationary, but of course we know now that it's a spinning sphere.) Here's a review by Cochrane Collaboration, where they looked at 15 studies involving 250,000 people and found no effect:
> Physical manipulation is cheaper than a scan tho!
This relies on the assumption that the physical examination has useful sensitivity or specificity as a screening tool which is untrue.
As an aside, MRI screening is not supported by evidence with the exception of select patients for breast cancer and people with hereditary cancer syndromes.
When I read this counterargument:
> Rothberg, the Cleveland Clinic physician, wrote a journal article about his father's experience a decade ago, when an annual checkup triggered a number of follow-up tests that cost $50,000 and ended up doing more harm than good.
Well, yeah... Not every country has a crazy overpriced healthcare system like the US where minor problems cost thousands. Also this sounds very much like a 'worst-case example'.
Here in Spain everything is free. Yes, the state pays for it, but the state also pays for treatments that will be more expensive when things get out of hand. And a yearly check is pretty standard and even required by employers. It has happened twice that they found a problem in my blood check. Both cases it was nothing but if it had been, knowing it early could have saved my life.
> In the physical, the doctor used his hands to examine the patient’s stomach. He thought the aorta felt a bit enlarged there and might be an abdominal aortic aneurysm. This led to a cascade of tests — even though the patient turned out not to have an aneurysm — and during one, he nearly bled to death.
Yes medical tests can go wrong. But a scan would have been a much safer option here than just to go poking around.
> This means that in the midst of a primary care shortage in the United States, doctors are spending several hours on visits that evidence suggests are a waste of time and could be harmful.
A primary care shortage should be fixed. Not used as a reason to not do checks. Especially in older people cancer is one of leading causes of death.