Many people each year go to their doctor to get an annual physical just to make sure everything is in good shape. But is it really worth the time (for you and the doctor) and the money if you don’t have any symptoms?
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, says you might as well skip it.
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Emanuel explains why research indicates there isn’t a whole lot of value for most people to see a doctor once a year just for a check up (again, assuming there are no symptoms or per-existing conditions).
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He references a 2012 evaluation done by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of medical researchers who systematically review the world’s biomedical research.
The group looked at 14 randomized controlled trials with over 182,000 people who were followed for a median of nine years. The goal was to evaluate the benefits of routine, general health checkups.
“The unequivocal conclusion: the appointments are unlikely to be beneficial,” Emanuel writes. “Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered, studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease. And the checkups consume billions, although no one is sure exactly how many billions because of the challenge of measuring the additional screenings and follow-up tests.”
Although the research is lacking, Emanuel believes that part of the reason people continue to have routine check-ups is because it’s become a habit and a social norm in one respect, but also because there is something comforting about the doctor-patient relationship, which can reduce anxiety by just knowing for sure that nothing is wrong. People also believe that many diseases or cancers are caught by chance in these procedures.
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If you screen thousands of people, maybe you’ll find tens whose exams suggest they might have a disease. And then upon further tests, you’ll find it is really only a few individuals who truly have something. And of those individuals, maybe one or two actually gain a health benefit from an early diagnosis.
Emanuel makes sure to note that preventative care for certain things is very important – like flu shots and colonoscopies. But the general checkup is likely just taking up time that could be used helping people who are actually sick.