The Emergency Room: Overtreatment as a Symptom of our System

The Emergency Room can be life saving, but also can be a place to be feared.  We discuss several cases in which protocols and robotic thinking put patients in precarious positions, exposing them to unnecessary dangers, creating diseases where none exist, and base diagnosis more on tests that should have never been ordered rather than on a history and physical and common sense.We talk about two issues about which we have written articles.  By clicking the hyperlinks you can access the articles, which are at the bottom of the page in each case.  One is syncope, where someone passes out, and in which the testing commonly done in the emergency room and even hospital admission are both unnecessary and potentially dangerous.  The second is the use of a blood test called Troponin, which is supposed to be used to diagnose heart attacks in people who present with symptoms consistent with an MI, but when done on people without such symptoms has a 5% accuracy and 95% over-diagnosis potential, exposing patients to dangerous over-treatment and labeling.