In an interview with The Takeaway, Dartmouth’s H. Gilbert Welch offers advice on ways to improve on annual medical checkups.
“The place where I have a problem, and where I think a lot of doctors have a problem, is when you have this vision of an annual checkup where we really look hard to see if we can find something wrong,” says Welch, a professor of medicine at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Instead of checkups, patients should have a “check-in” with their physicians, says Welch, author of Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. “The check-in should be an exploration of something and a sharing between a physician and the patient, not a concerted effort to look for things that are wrong.”
Listen to the full story, broadcast 8/21/13 on The Takeaway.