Choosing Wisely - How the patients see it!

          Flipping over the pages of my  my newspaper recently (I still like the feel of a real paper Paper - put it down to my age!) I chanced upon this heading in the letters section, "Playing Russian Roulette with cancer" .     There were two letters from folks who felt that their lives had been saved by early disgnosis, in the one case from breast cancer and in the other from prostate cancer. criticizing the "Choosing Wisely" program and clearly labeling it a  retrogressive, money saving scheme being presented as progressive health care.  I don't know the medical details of the cases they were referring to and anyway what we are reviewing here is the public perceptions of this program not the actual merits of it.  That is another issue.  I do understand the feelings of the patients and their families, however, because I am like thousands of other physicians, educated and indoctrinated for decades to actively pursue a policy of aggressive preventive health care.   Physicians who were remiss in carrying out some of the procedures that are actively being discouraged today would have been considered derelict in their duties.  After spending years indoctrinating patients to have their annual pap smears and mammograms and various other investigations, it is suggested by the various task forces that these measures were not actually necessary at all and in fact may actually be harmful!  What is the poor patient to think?  Have I been the victim of some vast medical scam?  Or is this just some money saving scheme conceived in the US to facilitate obamacare and  opportunistically seized by Canada to bolster up our own struggling health care system?  It's all very well for the various professional groups to discuss the pros and cons of reducing tests and investigations, and suggesting conferences between doctors and patients to decide what is necessary and what isn't, but I know what most patients think.  In real life this is going to be a nightmare for physicians and a potential gold mine for lawyers.

Comment if you care, otherwise we can let this issue die a quiet death!