CIGNA - Smart Decisions: Know Your Options: " Too much care can be just as bad as—or worse than—too little. Most medicines can have side effects. Medical tests can give false results that lead to the wrong care. Surgery almost always has risks. And anytime you get care, there is a chance of error.
When your doctor suggests or orders a medicine, surgery, a test, or any other kind of care, ask why you need it and what would happen if you waited. If you don't need it now, you might want to wait.
But also remember that there can be costs to doing nothing. The 'wait and see' option is not always the best. If you don't get care when you need it and a health problem gets worse, you may face higher costs than you would have if you had taken care of the problem sooner.
Asking why can help you and your doctor make the decision that's right for you."
Somehow asking why hasnt led to the expected results. A recent example: With the sympton of some prolonged coughing, the doctor advised some blood tests and the montoux test, suspecting TB. Now this test is very unreliable and has both false positives and false negatives. But discussing this with the doctor put him on the defensive and he even though he agreed that the test is unreliable, he went ahead to explain how he will make use of it given the results of blood tests, etc.
ReplyDeleteI found this utterly useless and still got the test done, which gave a postive result and still TB was ruled out later.
I am not sure what patients can do in such cases, if you dont get the test done, you are basically hurting the ego of the doctor.