About MRI: A Douglass Report

Here's the report verbatim...

The business of modern medicine You have to spend money to make money. That's an accepted fact in the business world. What a lot of people AREN'T ready to accept is that mainstream medicine is one of the biggest businesses out there -- which means that all of those same business rules apply. So when your doctor spends big bucks on diagnostic imagining equipment, you know good and well who's REALLY footing the bill. You are. That's why it came as no surprise to me when a recent study found that docs who buy or lease MRI machines have much higher rates of screenings -- and ultimately, surgeries. Researchers looked at Medicare claims for low back pain filed between 1998 and 2005 by primary care doctors and orthopedists, then isolated numbers on docs who bought or leased MRI machines in that time. They found a 32 percent increase among primary care docs in the months immediately afterwards. Orthopedists had a smaller increase -- just 13 percent. But that's because the machines helped keep them busy in other ways: That 13 percent boost in MRIs led to a 34 percent increase in surgery rates, according to the study in Health Services Research. If the surgeries were beneficial, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it. But for patients with back pain, neither the screening nor the surgeries that result from them are necessary. As I told you recently during a similar exposé on X-rays for back pain, nearly everyone ends up with disc "problems" like slips and bulges. (Read more here.) But most people never feel a thing -- proving that these disc issues are not the real cause of pain, just a convincing excuse to operate. And that's why most people who go through back surgery end up in as much pain as they were before, if not more -- because now they’re recovering from an invasive procedure to boot. So if your doc wants an MRI for something like back pain, find out if he owns the machine – and if he does, go get a second opinion.