Private Healthcare Scanning

The Scanner

Last week, an open letter was sent from the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC) to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley criticising the lack of regulation on Private Health Screenings.

Private Health Screenings, sometimes called “MOT Body Scans” have become increasingly popular in the last few years. They are offered by private healthcare providers to anyone with enough money and enough neuroses to buy one. These body scans are designed to appeal to what the government call “the worried well;” people who show no symptoms of any illness but, in the words of one provider, “are seeking the certainty over their own health that gives peace of mind.”

We used to call these people hypochondriacs.

The BMA and AMRC expressed concern in their letter that these organisations are marketed aggressively and with no oversight, and that they deliver poor healthcare outcomes.

A major concern surrounding these private companies is the accuracy of their findings. No one is arguing that the NHS is 100% accurate, but the reliability of these screenings appears to be questionable. Sadly, there are no accurate figures available as the private companies are not under the same obligation as the NHS to provide this level of data.

If someone pays good money for an MOT Body Scan and is wrongly given a clean bill of health, this might cause them to delay seeking help from their GP if a subsequent problem arises. No point going to the doctor about the chest pains if LifeScan checked you a couple of months ago and told you there was no problem.

More often, it appears, the opposite is true. Rather than giving people false assurances of good health, these companies have a tendency to err on the side of lucrative caution, recommending expensive and invasive follow up tests wherever possible.

In April, the Labour government brought in new regulation for these full body scans, but there are still very few rules governing the marketing of specific tests, such as those checking the heart, or the prostate. Speaking to the BBC, even Dr Peter Mace, assistant medical director of Bupa, said, “It’s true that the evidence on stroke screening is flaky.” To be fair to Bupa, they are one of the more scrupulous players in the market, and they have led calls for tighter regulation of their industry.

I’ve always chuckled at stories of doctors using their own private jargon of acronyms to annotate patient records – WOT (waste of time) and PIN (pain in the neck). The argument is that those people waste NHS resources by insisting on tests that are not necessary. So if those people have more money than sense, why not let them spend their own money on these expensive screenings?

The government has a duty to protect vulnerable people from exploitation by this poorly regulated industry. But more serious than protecting a fool and his money, there is clear evidence that, for a healthy person, the damage done by absorbing the x-rays commonly used in these scans is a greater risk to the patient’s health than the risk of a potential serious illness that has hitherto shown no symptoms. Simply, if there’s nothing wrong with you, an MOT Body Scan will do more harm than good.

These health screenings can be grouped under the heading CT Scans. The CT stands for Computerised Tomography, and the scan involves the relevant part of the body being passed through a circular scanner which uses x-rays to take a series of images. These images, which represent “slices” of the body, are then put together in a computer, creating a 3D digital image that can be explored without the need for invasive procedure.

If you need a colonoscopy, there’s no doubt that a CT Scan sounds much more attractive than the more traditional method of inserting a camera into the area in question. But doctors say the images created by this process, whilst useful, are not enough to satisfactorily identify polyps or tumorous cells. What’s more, the procedure exposes the patient to approximately 75 times the radiation received from a chest x-ray.

Brain Scan Slice

Over the last few years, this process has become cheaper to offer on a commercial basis, and so these “peace of mind” body scans have now appeared on the domestic market. They range in price from around £150 for a heart scan to as much as £1600 for a full body scan.

The NHS carries out a number of screening programmes such as Breast Screening for the over 50s. Over and above this type of universal programme, the NHS also provide specific testing for people who have a family history of illness. Prostate cancer is one such example. In cases where there is a clear statistical argument for screening a population with a high risk of illness, the NHS plays its part.

But does your GP provide the same level of screening as these private companies? No. But nor should they. For example, if I watched a documentary on television about heart disease, then rocked up at my doctor’s the next morning, demanding a chest scan, he would (after carefully ascertaining that I had no symptoms of heart disease) send me packing. Quite right too.

If I was showing the symptoms of heart disease, though, my GP would refer me for the appropriate scan. Clearly, the service provided by the NHS here is set at the appropriate level. As long as that can be maintained across the country – and I accept that’s a big condition – then there should be no need for these private health scans.

MOT Body Scans are more than an expensive way for the rich to buy peace of mind. They exploit people’s fears at the expense of rational risk management. As we have seen, the radiation levels can often do more harm than good. This is not an industry predicated on filling gaps filled by the inadequacy of the NHS; it is a manufactured industry preying on hypochondria.

Words by Gareth Allen. Images from VirtualMedicalCentre.com