Health care experts have been saying for 30 years — ever since a Canadian comprehensive study — that the annual physical exam is useless and even counter-productive, turning up false alarms that subject patients to unnecessary and even dangerous further testing. Now an article by a physician journalist in the New York Times sums up the evidence and concludes that the annual physical needs to go.
Elisabeth Rosenthal’s piece also has a good list of the top 10 tests, starting with the annual physical, that are wasteful and more harmful than good. Here’s the list.