Through the firestorm known as “healthcare reform” there are many, many hot button issues (myths?). There are misnomers like “death panels” and “socialized medicine” to the right, and ideas like “the glory of single-payer” and “no-need for tort reform” to the left. Amidst the far, far right and far, far left there are issues in the middle of the road that everyone agrees need to be addressed. One such issue: unnecessary testing.

Dr. WhiteCoat of WhiteCoat’s Call Room addresses the definition of “unnecessary testing.” He calls a spade a spade “…the term ‘unnecessary’ means that there is absolutely no likelihood that a test will find or exclude a disease…A majority of tests aren’t really ‘unnecessary,’ they just don’t show abnormalities very often.”

KevinMD of KevinMD.com goes into detail about why doctors order “routine” tests: the media, defensive medicine (another buzzword contender), reimbursement, and patient consumer-driven healthcare. Typically, “unnecessary testing” and “defensive medicine” go hand in hand. As a person without an MD, with considerable less insight into how doctors feel about malpractice, I find this statement incredibly enlightening: “If there were no-fault malpractice, health courts, or even caps (which I think is the least-effective solution), I would order less diagnostic tests. Period.”

Much like any topic there are two, three, four sides to even the simplest issue. But the fact remains that testing can be unnecessary or wasteful and it is costing Americans billions of dollars a year.

What do you think? Is unnecessary testing really “unnecessary?”