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I know an annual physical exam is supposed to check for the main issues of your health but are there any other exams or tests that check every single thing in your body. I am talking about blood tests, urinalysis, MRI, ultrasounds, CT scans, Pet scans, biopsies and anything else that can be done at once.
Looking at this question I know its loaded and to be honest quite absurd...how can you test every single issue that seems impossible but I am just curious if there is. I know taking care of your health lies in each individual but I have a fear that later on down the road I might develop some type of ailment or illness or disease that if caught now can be delayed or reversed or even mitigated.
I know an annual physical exam is supposed to check for the main issues of your health but are there any other exams or tests that check every single thing in your body. I am talking about blood tests, urinalysis, MRI, ultrasounds, CT scans, Pet scans, biopsies and anything else that can be done at once.
Looking at this question I know its loaded and to be honest quite absurd...how can you test every single issue that seems impossible but I am just curious if there is. I know taking care of your health lies in each individual but I have a fear that later on down the road I might develop some type of ailment or illness or disease that if caught now can be delayed or reversed or even mitigated.
Thank you in advance
Speaking for the PCPs I've had, in addition to a physical exam they order blood and/or urinalysis (plus pap test and mammogram for women) unless there is some specific reason to check further. So much is triggered by the person's health history and age too and those trigger other routine testing such as colonoscopies, maybe an EKG. If you have a specific concern about something based on family or personal history discuss it with your specific provider. There is nothing wrong with designing an individual monitoring protocol. Doing all that testing for the majority of people ends up being unnecessary. If they all did everything guess who would be complaining about their health premiums and health care costs?
Last edited by Parnassia; 12-22-2018 at 02:19 PM..
Your insurance company won't pay for tests that aren't warranted.
You may be able to get all the tests you want if you are private pay with, say, a concierge medical plan.
who mentioned anything about health insurance? If the patient has the money to pay with cash, why should the doctor refuse under the excuse that "is not warranted". If the patients wants to get tested "just to see" what's the problem with that. They want to make you believe they care about your pockets.
They don't do it because unless it goes through INSURANCE, the doctors will never get paid. The doctor rather you pay through insurance than your own money for expensive procedure such as tests. They would send you a bill for those expensive tests. If health insurance didn't exist, the doctors would never get paid for all the work they do.
They expect you to have serious symptoms, which in many cases, it could mean whatever disease you have is already advanced, to finally "warrant" tests. By then it may already be over, and doctor will say, well sorry, you're diagnosed late.
The opposite happens in the ER, they are more likely to do tests for anything, not only because they have all the modern equipment right there, but also because, even if you have insurance, you will be screwed with a huge bill. Most people who go the ER, don't have insurance, they know this. Whenever they ask you, do you have insurance? They're basically letting you know you're gonna be screwed by them.
In other words, they only care about the money. They'll sent you a bill, but even if you don't pay, they are still getting paid by the government and taxes, and the system will collect on that bill, and you can be sued and your wages garnished.
At ER the doctors have no problem doing whatever tests you want or they think you need, as they would still get paid their salaries regardless.
This doesn't apply to primary doctor with a small office at your local town, he can't afford to just send bills and not have insurance be involved, otherwise he would never get paid. He doesn't have the government and a whole lot of heads above him that will guarantee his salary. Doctors at the ER, get paid regardless you pay the bills or not, because millions of people go to the ER every year.
It is thanks to the government why you can go to the ER and not be refused help regardless if you have money or not. The government makes sure all the medical professionals there get paid and that bills are collected one way or another. Its the system and you can't escape it.
That's why the ER bills are expensive, even if some don't pay them, goes to collections, millions and millions of dollars is generated every year. This can't be compared to a regular doc at the local town.
Last edited by NasalPolyps; 12-22-2018 at 06:51 PM..
who mentioned anything about health insurance? If the patient has the money to pay with cash, why should the doctor refuse under the excuse that "is not warranted". If the patients wants to get tested "just to see" what's the problem with that. They want to make you believe they care about your pockets.
They don't do it because unless it goes through INSURANCE, the doctors will never get paid.
No, they don’t do it because it’s poor medical practice to test an asymptomatic person for everything under the sun. Run enough tests, and you WILL get one that comes back abnormal - and though the odds favor the result being a false positive, the patient will now need that abnormal result worked up. And that workup could involve procedures that could injure or even kill the patient! Testing is NOT benign; it should only be done when there are clear indications for performing it.
No test is perfect--they all produce some false negatives and false positives. Baye's Theorem proves that when a test is done on a population that has low likelihood of having the disease, it actually increases the number of those false results-- so it's never good to do all tests on all pts.
A good screening test should be cheap and easy to do and to have a fairly high chance of finding a problem. A U/A, CBC & Chem 24 only costs the lab ~$5 to perform and have a very good chance of finding something wrong-- although an abnormal test won't tell you exactly what it is, but will direct the doc to order more specific tests.
Chest x-rays were used to screen for TB prior to ~1960 when that was a common problem. It's fairly rare now and it doesn't pay to routinely do CXRs. EKGs have zero predictive value-- they can only tell you about your heart rhythm as the test is being done, or to identify "scars" from previous MIs. CTs are expensive and radiation damage is cumulative so you don't want to do any more than necessary. "Low dose CT" may prove to be useful in screening smokers for cancer, but right now no concensus on when to start or how often.
Colonoscopy as a screening test is a dilemma-- it's expensive and the prep may be harmful to elderly pts. The benefit is that colon polyps are pretty common and most colon ca starts out as a polyp. It's easy to remove them thru the scope and if the one removed was destined to turn cancerous, the pt is saved a lot of future grief. The problem from the public health policy standpoint is that when you add up the cost of all the colonoscopies that had to be performed to save one case of cancer, maybe it's cheaper (smaller drain on society) to just do the surgery & treatment on the full blown case of ca. So much for "The Good Shepard Parable."
Now we're getting into the Age of Genetic Testing and it remains to be seen what that will do for us. There are many ethical questions to be answered. How much of your future do you want to know? How will that affect your lifestyle, your life choices? What if they say you have some deadly gene and you go and blow all your money fast, and then they find out the test was wrong?
who mentioned anything about health insurance? If the patient has the money to pay with cash, why should the doctor refuse under the excuse that "is not warranted". If the patients wants to get tested "just to see" what's the problem with that. They want to make you believe they care about your pockets.
They don't do it because unless it goes through INSURANCE, the doctors will never get paid. The doctor rather you pay through insurance than your own money for expensive procedure such as tests. They would send you a bill for those expensive tests. If health insurance didn't exist, the doctors would never get paid for all the work they do.
They expect you to have serious symptoms, which in many cases, it could mean whatever disease you have is already advanced, to finally "warrant" tests. By then it may already be over, and doctor will say, well sorry, you're diagnosed late.
The opposite happens in the ER, they are more likely to do tests for anything, not only because they have all the modern equipment right there, but also because, even if you have insurance, you will be screwed with a huge bill. Most people who go the ER, don't have insurance, they know this. Whenever they ask you, do you have insurance? They're basically letting you know you're gonna be screwed by them.
In other words, they only care about the money. They'll sent you a bill, but even if you don't pay, they are still getting paid by the government and taxes, and the system will collect on that bill, and you can be sued and your wages garnished.
At ER the doctors have no problem doing whatever tests you want or they think you need, as they would still get paid their salaries regardless.
This doesn't apply to primary doctor with a small office at your local town, he can't afford to just send bills and not have insurance be involved, otherwise he would never get paid. He doesn't have the government and a whole lot of heads above him that will guarantee his salary. Doctors at the ER, get paid regardless you pay the bills or not, because millions of people go to the ER every year.
It is thanks to the government why you can go to the ER and not be refused help regardless if you have money or not. The government makes sure all the medical professionals there get paid and that bills are collected one way or another. Its the system and you can't escape it.
That's why the ER bills are expensive, even if some don't pay them, goes to collections, millions and millions of dollars is generated every year. This can't be compared to a regular doc at the local town.
You have an incredibly warped misunderstanding of everything related to medical care....testing, ER care, insurance.....you name it....you don't understand it...
SO many inaccuracies in this one post lets start with some of the biggies...
1. "Most patients that go to the ED don't have insurance". FALSE....in fact numbers of uninsured frequenting ED varies from 15-30%
2. "At the ER doctors have no problem doing whatever tests you want...." FALSE no physician in any practice whether ED, urgent care, private practice etc is doing whatever "tests a patient wants"....that isn't how medical care works....
3. The "government" doesn't insure medical professionals get paid and bills aren't "collected" one way or another....where do you get these ridiculous notions????
4. There is a problem with doing tests "just to see" because there are false negatives and this leads to more tests and more cost to the health system and potential injury to the patient that was never warranted in the first part...
Honestly you are incredibly naive regarding health care.....
You can always go on line and sign up and pay yourself for blood tests. Labcorp and Sonora Quest as well as others offer this.
I just did it to test for Sjogrens arthritis because I would like to narrow down the type of arthritis that has me in pain so much. It was my own personal choice to do this and I never asked the Dr. to authorize it. (He probably would have.)
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