Annual Or Not To Annual
You might think that to stay 100% healthy you should hassle your doctor once a year. This is an institutionalised idea that has been with us since life insurance companies in the 1880s wanted to remain solvent. The eureka moment was when they found a correlation between sugar in the urine of healthy people, and the chances of them going on to getting diabetes and kidney disease.
Doctors begrudgingly took on the task, and after a lifetime or two of doing them they cemented themselves as a feature of the medical landscape. But do they have any meaningful effect in our health outcomes? Numerous recent studies suggest that no, systematic offers of health checks are unlikely to be beneficial and may lead to unnecessary tests and treatments.
According to one study in 2019 that used data involving over 500,000 participants, “Experience from screening programmes for individual diseases have shown that the benefits may be smaller than expected and the harms greater.”
Speaking from Harvard in discussion over the studies, Amy Ship, MD states that, “some of the components of an annual visit may actually cause harm. For example, lab tests and exams that are ordered for healthy patients (as opposed to people with symptoms or known illnesses) are statistically more likely to be “false positives”… Even if these inaccurate findings affect only a tiny percentage of the more than 200 million adults who would undergo such exams, the monetary, practical, and emotional costs are huge.”
“Although a number of professional guidelines recommend that physicians should no longer follow the tradition of the annual exam, data show that the frequency of these exams hasn’t diminished.”
Fortunately in New Zealand, we tend to be a little bit smarter with these things. In fact, prostate exams for healthy people without symptoms isn’t recommended here already due to the chances of it causing more problems than it solves.
At the end of the day, frequency of checks is something you should talk about with your doctor, and if you do think something is off, don’t wait around to find out.