Recent headlines about a new study from Consumer Reports have created a scare about protein powders. For example, CBS has a typically alarmist opening paragraph:
Let’s leave aside the pros and cons of protein powder for this post and just grant for the moment that:
a) people can get all the protein they need from a well balanced diet and don’t need protein powders, and b) some people, for a variety of reasons, find benefit to including protein powders in their diets.
For those who fall into this later category, should they stop using protein powders simply for fear of lead contamination?
In my last post, I fleshed out some of the logical arguments for why overtesting (the practice of ordering lots of tests, “just to check”) can sometimes backfire on patients and lead to worse outcomes. Today I’m going to provide brief vignettes of two actual patients I cared for during my residency training to better illustrate the point.
Many people assume that the lack of pro-active testing for every possible problem in medicine is simply done as a cost savings measure. Patients will sometimes complain to me that their insurance won’t cover a periodic full-body MRI, or a routine stress test, or blood testing in the absence of any symptoms for this disease or that. And there is some validity to this critique: it’s certainly true that insurers like to spend as little money as possible on patients. But to be fair, there is another side to the argument, which is that – contrary to what many assume – testing for problems that aren’t apparent can sometimes in fact be harmful.
This is a difficult topic to grasp, so I’m going to break this post down into two parts. Today, I will outline some of the logic behind why tests can sometimes create more problems than they prevent. In next week’s post, I will give a few actual anecdotes from my career that demonstrate the point.
How could it possibly be that ordering tests to screen for health problems can be harmful?
The researchers in the study performed several separate lines of research and published them all in one paper. First, using advanced lab techniques, they studied humans and determined the following:
