Word: doctores
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...professor team at the University of Chicago surveyed 466 faculty physicians at Chicago-area medical schools. Almost half of the 231 respondents - 45% - said they had prescribed placebos in regular clinical practice and, of those, just over half had prescribed them in the previous year. Among the reasons the doctors gave: to calm a patient down, to respond to demands for medication that the doctor felt was unnecessary, or simply to do something after all other clinical treatment options had failed...
...years back we used plain films to diagnose nearly everything - appendicitis, kidney stones, pneumonia, broken bones - and an X-ray alone was enough. We took care of them all just using plain films. Today, however, there's a good chance that after ordering up that plain film, the emergency doctor will send you down the hall for a second test - one that exposes you to many hundreds of times the radiation of a plain film: a CT scan. The radiation from a CT scan, or computed tomography, actually has been shown to cause cancer - quite...
...rational decisions be made regarding their use? The statistics are hard to calculate. It would take all the computers at the Mayo clinic to compare the real risk to your life of doing a CT scan in a given situation with that of not doing one. And if the doctor can't compute that risk, there's no real way that a second-guessing patient can. But you can, and should, be more than a little reticent to have a CT scan unless it's absolutely needed...
...acute abdominal conditions. Minutes can make a difference in these cases - if, say, there's bleeding around your brain and you can't get an MRI - and the speed of a CT scan makes it worth the risk. But in most other situations, it's wise to let the doctor convince you it's worth it, before consenting to the scan. Ask your doctor what decisions he or she plans to make with the information from the scan. What other tests could yield the same information? Would an MRI be better? Ask why the CT scan is necessary right...
...reality is that in some cases, you'll need a CT scan. If so, just remember that for you to be there, breathing, you've already beaten the odds of sickness and death any number of times. And you'll probably beat the CT-cancer odds too. If the doctor's answer to your questions, however, is something like "Well, why not do a CT scan?" or "A CT scan would show it too" or "A CT scan would rule out something rare" my response would be "Why not skip the scan?" One in fifty cancers is a hard number...