Medical Evidence and Getting the Right Care
Choosing Medical Treatments Wisely The spate of media articles on unnecessary procedures and treatments which do not improve health and can harm patients is a sentinel cry to the public. This article addresses the types of questions patients and their families need to ask when faced with health care decisions and where to get answers. Understand the Disease Evidence One of the statistical principles which patients should understand is that an increase in the incidence (precursor) of a disease does not mean an increase in the invasiveness or death from the disease. A good example of this is thyroid cancer, here-to-for a relatively obscure disease which has now hurtled into 9 th place in the cancer lexicon, as elucidated by Dr. R. Michael Tuttle in Medscape Oncology. [1] What this phenomena means to the general public as well as clinicians is the surveillance and testing for this condition has increased in specificity and volume. This does not in fact mean that there are more invasive t...