By Rema Nagarajan in Times of India
Several doctors from all over India and across disciplines are joining hands to fight against the menace of unnecessary investigations. The Society for Less Investigative Medicine (SLIM), which was initiated last year by a few cardiologists in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, is now becoming a national society.
SLIM will start off by putting together a list of what investigations ought not to be done in normal circumstances in different fields of medicine accompanied by a detailed explanation of how over-diagnosis from such tests could lead to unnecessary treatment that would not only be a waste of resources but could also harm patients.
Eminent cardiologist and president of the Public Health Foundation of India Dr K Srinath Reddy said that he joined SLIM because he was fully convinced that inappropriate medical care was common, frequently involving unnecessary investigations and interventions. "This has both financial and health costs which are unacceptable. There are many doctors, in both public and private sectors, who share this view and would like to reverse this trend, restoring science and sanctity to patterns of medical practice," said Dr Reddy.
Asked about a private healthcare 'industry' looking for high growth in India, Dr Reddy said that while it was expected that the industry will push for profit maximisation, it was still unacceptable to practice scientifically and ethically bad, exploitative and dangerous medicine just to make more money. "Growth of India's health care facilities should serve to fill healthcare gaps and respond to unmet needs, not to generate ill-gotten gains from a profligate use of technologies even when not needed. Growth is desirable, but it cannot be cancerous. The medical profession must return to its ethical moorings and restore purity to its practice," said Dr Reddy.
"We have unwittingly been complicit in creating an epidemic of misinformed doctors and misinformed patients contributing to considerable harm and great expense to our national economies. The root causes include biased funding of research, biased reporting in medical journals, commercial conflicts of interest and a lack of understanding amongst doctors and patients of health statistics and risk," said Dr Aseem Malhotra, consultant clinical associate to the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in the UK, who is part of Choosing Wisely, UK.
