What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses - New York Times

Yesterday at the hospital where I work, a demented patient who is dying and for whom it has been decided that no aggressive treatments will be done, had a physician order a painful, invasive, procedure which would have yielded no significant information. Terry my friend and coworker would have said "Teaching hospital" and we both would have known exactly what he meant.
Now I know this rant takes a somewhat different tack than Dr. Welch's article does. He's talking about over diagnosing, over testing, and over treating those who aren't really sick. I'm talking about over diagnosing, over testing, and over treating those who are so far gone that there isn't any hope of making their lives any longer and certainly not better.
In a teaching hospital teams of physicians change frequently. Depending on whim and the pet theories of their latest instructors the patients they take over will suddenly have be retested for everything in sight. Never mind that they were already retested by the last group of residents who flashed through. Apparently it is the fondest wish of a medical student or resident to be the first on their block to discover a disease or disorder which their friends haven't yet. Even if they don't, they get to practice expensive, painful, procedures that no doctor out in the world would dream of ordering for fear of the reaming a lawyer might hand them.
To that end, every 89-year old gomer from the nursing home admitted with pneumonia gets a spinal tap looking for hydrocephalus or meningitis when they have a long-standing history of Alzheimer's Disease. Maybe blood tests looking for Lyme Disease, perhaps the 14th repeat of a hypothyroid panel just in case it comes up positive this time. Maybe even a repeat head CAT Scan or MRI "just to make sure."

These young doctors are so earnest, so convinced. They actually believe that they are doing these crazed, demented, deathly ill, suffering souls some sort of favor. I'd call them cute but someday I'll be a crazed old gomer myself suffering through their Josef Mengele-style mercy. If I still have any self-awareness left I'll be wishing for the sweet release of death only to be thwarted by some deadly serious kid who just bought their first stethoscope last fall.