Annual Check-up Worthwhile? Docs Think So
Reuters Health
Monday, June 27, 2005
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For the last 20 years, professional guidelines have advised doctors that there’s no evidence to show that an annual physical examination is necessary for someone who doesn’t have any apparent health problems.
The message does not seem to have gotten through. A survey finds that most primary care providers believe in the value of annual check-ups, and are performing them anyway.
A postal survey was sent to 1679 primary care providers in Boston, Denver, and San Diego, and 783 (47 percent) responded.
Sixty-five percent of respondents thought that an annual physical examination is necessary, Dr. Allan V. Prochazka, from the VA Medical Center in Denver, and colleagues report in the Archives of Internal Medicine for June 27. Moreover, 88 percent said they performed such examinations.
As an indication of the low awareness of official guidelines, 55 percent of the doctors disagreed with the statement that “national organizations do not advocate an annual physical exam.”
On the other hand, 63 percent of primary care docs said that the annual physical is of proven value, and 74 percent thought such exams improve detection of subclinical illness.
Also, more than 90 percent of the respondents believed that an annual exam provides an opportunity to counsel patients about preventative health, and improves patient-doctor relationships.
Seventy-eight percent thought that most patients wanted such exams.
So why the gap between guidelines and practice? Two editorialists suggest that there’s more to an annual check-up than meets the eye.
“We think there may be something valuable to the annual physical that patients and physicians are telling us indirectly,” they say.
That message could lead to healthcare improvements “in ways we might not even imagine,” write Dr. Patrick G. O’Malley, from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and Dr. Philip Greenland, from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Science in Bethesda, Maryland.
“First, let us study (the annual physical), before we abandon it,” they conclude.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, June 27, 2005.
