A recent article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press raised legitimate questions about the health benefits of broad, frequent medical screenings among healthy individuals.
Some Chattanooga doctors "fear that across-the-board screenings can lead to unnecessary, costly and debilitating treatments for patients who never would have experienced any symptoms, let alone death, from their 'disease,'" the reporter noted.
Actually, that squares with something that Douglas Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, wrote in a letter to Congress in 2009, on the subject of trying to save health care dollars by using widespread preventive services.
"[T]he evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall," he wrote.
"That result may seem counterintuitive. For example, many observers point to cases in which a simple medical test, if given early enough, can reveal a condition that is treatable at a fraction of the cost of treating that same illness after it has progressed. In such cases, an ounce of prevention improves health and reduces spending - for that individual. But ... doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway."
He added, "Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness."
That doesn't mean people with a family history of serious illnesses or other risk factors for those illnesses shouldn't undergo screenings.
But as with all medical care, reason and common sense should be applied to medical testing.