Muscle Repair Shop

Last Saturday, October 29,2011, I was reading an article in the New York Times National newspaper when I came an article,”Sports medicine Said to Overuse a Popular Scan.” The article was about the use, or overuse of MRIs on injured athletes and casual exercisers like runners, golfer, tennis players, and bicyclists. Dr Andrews tested his suspicion of the MRI on 31 healthy professional baseball pitchers. All of these pitchers had no injuries and no pain in their pitching shoulder. After he scanned each of the pitchers, the MRI’s showed 90% of them had abnormal shoulder cartilage and 87% had abnormal rotator cuff tendons. How many of us have had MRI’s and was told we needed surgery, when possibly we didn’t. Dr Andrews says,”If you want an excuse to operate on a pitcher’s throwing shoulder, just get an MRI.”
I don’t want to discount MRI’s totally as they are very helpful in finding tumors and distinguishing between competing diagnosis. However, many sports injury related patients expect the scan to the point of disbelief if not used and the doctors who own their own machine can find it very lucrative.
The danger is if a doctor doesn’t understand what he/she is looking at on the scan, a healthy person can be misdiagnosed and given a harmful treatment based on the misdiagnosis.
I am not against scans and tests if they are helpful in the diagnosis. However if these tests are only used to make additional money, protect the doctors from possible lawsuits, or just make the patient feel better then we have some fundamental changes that need to occur.
As a patient, your body will hurt from time to time. If you injure yourself no one can safely stop the pain immediately without some side effects because your body needs the time to heal. The first a patient must take is responsibility for your own health. Watch your weight, exercise regularly, and stay mentally postive will go a long way in reducing your healthcare costs. We need to change our practices as we are praticing medicine the most expensive way.