Be aware of health screening risks
posted in - Health tips, - Palmdoc |The Star has a useful report which warns consumers to Be aware of health screening risks
Doctors and patients are encouraged to choose personalised and tailor-made health screenings over commercialised screenings, said an International Medical University (IMU) consultant physician.
Dr Verna Lee Kar Mun said every individual had different risk factors to certain diseases.
“Screening is an important aspect of prevention but not all diseases are suitable for screening,” said the IMU senior lecturer. She was giving a talk entitled “To Screen or Not to Screen?” at IMU in Bukit Jalil yesterday.
Dr Verna described the mass health screening programmes from hospitals, clinics, hotels and laboratories, sold in packages at different rates, as “commercialised”.
She advocated the need for both patients and doctors to take pro-active roles to ensure only proper and necessary health screenings were performed.
While it is indeed true that ideally any screening should be “individualized”, screening packages put together by laboratories make things easier for the practitioner and indeed possibly cheaper. What is also true is that some private labs may be pushing quite unnecessary tests of little or no value in so-called “comprehensive screening” packages (an example are the worthless “cancer markers” we blogged about)
Moral of the story : consumers be aware and always discuss with your doctors before being taken in for a ride by laboratories offering all these wonderful sounding “comprehensive blood test” screening packages.
Related posts:
Miracle Blood Tests?
One-Third Of Medical Screenings Performed Are Not Recommended
The RM1000 “Comprehensive check-up”
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July 26th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
This unethical culture has been practising very common for years in the large city like KL, penang and JB. So many medical centers in KL has prospered and some even plan for KLSE listing and building their own building after several years of this called ‘health screening’ practise in the country.
I strongly believed that the situation will get worsen overtime especially when ours lovely Health Minister is promoting the medical tourism. What else is medical toursim, it is all about $$$$. Bear in mind that Kuala Lumpur has the highest density of CT scan machine in the world.
When you go for health screening in the private medical center. RM1000 is the cheapest and actually the package includes all sort of nonsense screening test from Groups of tumor markers test can cost about RM400, unnecessary angiogram despite CAC shows a very minimal calcification <1.
Beware when you are approached with unknown call saying that you have been selected for the discounted 'health screening' test in Malaysia. The nightmare will begin when you go and sign up for the package which includes CT brain, CT lung, CT neck, CAC scores and many many others. The marketing team will try their best to scare you that you are about to get cancer, chronic disease and heart attack if you are not going to sign up.
Some customers (water fish) even signed up for the medical package for 5 to 10 years programme and paid in advance 20K to the medical center.
Some doctors who is success in setting up the medical center got interviewed by the local TV channel and saying how he started business and how difficult he got to it. Back to the fact that, the money all come to the innocent customers (water fish) who has been brain washed or scared by the heartless marketing personal. They get fat bonus everytime a customer signed up the package and the water fish think they were lucky and was put on the table for them to scan this and that and bleed their wallet with at least RM3000-5000. After found out eveything is normal (almost 98% cases), they even thanked the medical center for doing that to them. See how innocent the patient especially from our nearby country one.
One of the top marketing personal can earn up to RM100k/month (more than anyone of you). They can promise you that anything can be cured as long as you sign up the screening package. By screening 8 patients a day with all scan done, the medical center can easily earned RM40k without risk compares to a cardiothoracic surgeon undergoing a triple bypass which cost around RM38k in private.
I don't see any sign that Ministry of Health in curbing this type of practice but I see the MOH in fact is ENCOURAGING it. Only small amount of doctors are actually talk and do what ever is necessary. It is like using a machine gun to shoot all targets aimlessly (do all & everything) and later see which bullet hit the target (showing abnormal result). After that just work out from there – (MA & nurses all can do this la)
July 26th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Very true, I knew one so called health screening centre which regularly bring in Indonesian ‘patients’ for screening which include upper and lower scopes for patient as young as 18 years old. Even though these commercial centre especially the labs are required by law to have investigations done ONLY by doctors’ request. They get around the law by hiring the doctor whose job is only to order investigations or sign investigation request form.
August 13th, 2010 at 6:12 am
“Kuala Lumpur has the highest density of CT scan machine in the world.”
From where can I get a reference on this matter?