The Evidence Gap - Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart - Series - NYTimes.com: "While clinical trials have not shown that stents benefit patients with no symptoms of heart disease, they are still routinely inserted in such patients when tests find significant blockages. Cardiologists joke that the phenomenon is “ocular stenosis” — blockages that can be seen are stented.
“You find a lot of asymptomatic disease,” said John O. Goodman, a business consultant to cardiologists. “It will put more patients in the cath lab” — medical shorthand for a cardiac catheterization laboratory, where conventional angiograms and stenting procedures take place.
Ms. Mitchell said cardiologists simply practice medicine the way the health system rewards them to. Given the opportunity to recommend a test for which they will make money, the doctors will.
“This is not greed,” she said. “This is normal economic behavior.”"
Doctors are humans - and will behave just like other humans do !
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