Disease-Mongering - For Profit !

Along with cancer, the trio of diseases that most frighten Australians are heart attack and stroke.  They can happen without warning and apart from death they can inflict lifestyle changes that persist to the grave.  Stroke sufferers often suffer part paralysis and loss of memory function - and across this country someone falls victim to this disease every ten minutes.

Customers of a popular chemist shop chain are urged to have their susceptibility to stroke checked with an on the spot examination by a resident doctor.  If the doctor finds evidence of plaque or narrowing in the carotid artery of the neck you will be referred to a specialist and most likely booked for an ultrasound.  That doctors examination will be bulk billed and the ultrasound will cost Medicaire hundreds of dollars, but the patient will pay nothing.

To most people that sounds like medical progress.  Relief from the worry that artery stenosis may be narrowing the arteries of the neck and bringing us closer to collapse and the need for an ambulance to rush us to hospital.  Unfortunately the Australian and New Zealand Society of Vascular Surgeons see it differently.   They consider it as disease-mongering and masquerading as a charity to make money out of Medicare.

This seems to be operated by a group of people with no medical experience who have teamed up with a gym, a university and a large company to promote its work.  The Ultrasound can produce many " self positive " results and this was terrifying people who had no real risk of stroke.  In fact the US Preventive Services Taskforce had evaluated ultrasound to screen the risk of stroke in 2014 and concluded that it did more harm than good. The best defence against stroke was to have regular checks with your general practitioner who would be likely to know the family history and keep a host of other determining factors under control.

Unfortunately open ended medical protection such as Medicare is always under cost risk because of over use of its services.   The propensity of patients to sue doctors has seen the ordering of many tests that are more designed to protect the doctor from negligence action than to screen the patient for disease - and they blow out the overall cost of Medicare on the taxpayer.

What is being offered by this stroke service is perfectly legal.   The problem is that it does not deliver value for money !