Is Your Yearly Physical a Waste of Time?

By Niko Karvounis, Health Beat. Posted January 26, 2009.

This article originally appeared on Health Beat.

According to the American College of Physicians (ACP), instead of having an annual physical, “healthy adults should undergo a much-streamlined exam that’s focused on prevention every one to five years depending on a person’s age, sex and medical profile.”

So what does that mean, exactly? According to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, doctors should focus on “interventions that help patients change health-impairing habits or that spotlight emerging illnesses for which reliable and effective treatments exist.”  These include “Pap smears, mammograms, cholesterol tests, blood-pressure checks, and counseling to stop smoking, lose weight, get more exercise and eat a healthier diet.” In other words, rather than just checking for everything, doctors should focus on interventions that can be substantively linked to treatments we know work. Currently, most check-ups are comprehensive run-throughs that seem to be administered  just for their own sake, regardless of how, or even if, they relate to meaningful treatments.

For many of us, the annual physical is a fixture of our health care experience, something we assume to be both necessary and desirable. Indeed, a study released last month found that 64 million Americans a year get a physical or gynecological exam, costing a total of $7.8 billion.  Regular gynecological exams are important -- they include Pap smears that have made cervical cancer a rare disease. But the point of the general physical is less clear.  More people get annual check ups than visit doctors for respiratory conditions or high blood pressure, and the price tag for yearly physicals closes in on the $8.1 billion spent on breast cancer care.

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Niko Karvounis is a Program Officer with The Century Foundation in New York City, where he works on issues of socioeconomic inequality and health care. He is a regular contributor to Health Beat, the Foundation’s health care blog.

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