There’s a popular belief among medical futurists that one day biological science will progress to a point where doctors will be able to treat just about any disease before it presents its first symptom. From a certain perspective it seems reasonable that if we collect enough patient data and develop good predictive models that it would be possible to eliminate disease altogether. Broadly speaking, this is the promise of Functional Medicine—a medical approach that believes it can treat the “root cause” of disease.
Whether or not a Star Trek-type Functional Medicine might exist down the line, the people who promote it today—medical influencers, concierge doctors and chronic disease specialists—have very little evidence that their testing and treatment paradigms actually work. In fact, in many cases the belief that futuristic medicine already exists can do more harm that good.
In this week’s video I tackle the question of whether getting more medical testing actually results in better health outcomes. Obviously, there are times where catching an illness in early stages is often beneficial—this is why medical guidelines suggest periodic screenings for colon and breast cancers. But don’t confuse the guidelines with the idea that catching something early is always better.
It might seem counterintuitive, but the gap of not testing is just as important to a healthy life as testing.
This is because tests run the risk of finding unexpected things—what doctors call “incidentalomas” that open the door to further investigation, more treatments more testing, for illnesses that might have never developed into disease at all. Those unnecessary treatment come at all sorts of costs—from exposure to ionizing radiation, to drug interactions, debilitating surgery, or just simply delaying the ordinary standard of medical care.
As Dr. Kian Modanlou said to me in this week’s video, “Don’t run a test if you don’t want to take action from the results.”
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