By Joan Stephenson, PhD
When billionaire-entrepreneur-Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lobbed a Tweet in early April advising his followers to have their blood tested “for everything available” every 3 months, he probably didn’t expect to unleash a Twitterspheric debate on medical overuse.
Scores of health journalists and clinicians jumped on this ill-advised tweet, explaining that such overtesting can result in false positives, further testing, unneeded treatment, patient stress, and considerable costs.
Although it’s unlikely that the furor swayed opinions on either side, it reflects a larger, thoughtful conversation within the healthcare community. That discussion is the “less is more” movement to reduce overuse of “low-value” services such as screening, diagnostic tests, or treatments that are unlikely to help patients and pose risk of harm.
Proponents of less-is-more medicine stress that its focus is avoiding harm rather than mere cost-cutting, which consumers fear might reduce access to necessary care. But it’s also clear that targeting tests and procedures that offer little or no value, involve unnecessary risks to patients, and result in avoidable downstream care will indeed reduce wasteful healthcare spending.
