Lifeline screening

[stoaX]

Has anyone ever used lifeline screening?  The idea is that you pay a couple of hundred dollars and this outfit performs the following tests:
-carotid artery screening for plaque
-heart rhythm screening
-abdominal aortic aneurysm screening
-peripheral arterial disease screening

My health insurance is unlikely to cover these screenings because I have no symptoms that would warrant these tests.  But I am in my early 60's.

[lthenderson]

There are several issues with using these sorts of services, which by the way, have been investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and have had negative articles written on them in peer reviewed medical journals like JAMA (Aug 11, 2014)

1. Medical experts say Life Line Screening is not appropriate for unselected asymptomatic individuals in the general population and is more likely to cause harm than to provide benefit. No guidelines issued by any major medical professional organization support such screening practices.

2. The promotion of Life Line Screening’s primary screening package relies on fearmongering — scaring healthy individuals about their future health.

3. For many people, false-positive test results from this screening can lead to unfounded anxiety and additional unnecessary, risky and costly diagnostic procedures and treatment interventions. Moreover, false-positive test results can lead to financial harms because of the costs of unnecessary follow-up testing and interventions.

4. Screening unselected, asymptomatic people will lead to overdiagnosis, which occurs when individuals are diagnosed with conditions that will never progress to cause symptoms or death. Like a false-positive result, overdiagnosis leads to unnecessary anxiety and unnecessary medical interventions.

5. The promotion and provision of this screening is unethical.

My spouse is a medical doctor and gets people showing up regularly with "bad" results from these tests. The first thing she does after a full interview is to reorder any appropriate tests. Many don't exhibit any symptoms and thus get denied reimbursement by insurance companies meaning more out of pocket costs. If you are truly concerned, you should visit your doctor for an annual checkup which checks you for risk factors on all the diseases being tested by such companies.

[stoaX]

Thanks @lthenderson for for the inside information! The marketing materials do have a suspicious vibe to them.

[Metalcat]

If you are asymptomatic, then the most likely result of these tests, were they to find anything, would be a recommendation to improve your lifestyle.

You don't need a bunch of ultrasounds to tell you to improve your lifestyle if it's not optimally healthy.

I'm a health professional and we were constantly being sold on "screening" technology that was very easy to sell to patients and a great padder of the bottom line. There's a lot of money in excessive testing. No one ethical implemented these screenings though.

If a bad test result is just going to result in me telling the person to lower their risk through lifestyle, then what added value does the test even have, other than to perhaps make the plea more convincing?

I had this experience recently at two clinics that offer the exact same treatment. One was in the US and did TONS of imaging and testing and the other is in Canada and does no imaging or testing. Same treatment for the same issue, both doctors trained under the same MD, so exact same educational background.

But in one jurisdiction it's legal to do all that imaging and in the other it isn't. In fact the most expensive imaging the US doctor did is with a machine that's banned in Canada because it's use doesn't actually change the treatment recommendations.

No matter what is found on that imaging, the treatment is always based on symptoms. So it's a ton of radiation for literally no benefit.

Testing that isn't driven by diagnostic criteria is often not only useless but dangerous. It seems intuitive that more testing would be better, but test results are often vague puzzle pieces. They're rarely just cut and dry useful information that you can actually do something with.

I wish they were. All of our lives would be so much easier if tests were just little black and white indicators of exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it, but they aren't.

So if you want, you can send me $150 and I'll tell you to exercise more, eat better, pet some animals regularly, and take up meditation, because that's basically all you can get from those tests anyway.

[stoaX]

Thanks @Metalcat , I appreciate the response and the $150check is in the mail.  Cash it quick before my stash runs out!