FOR years, experts have recommended that you visit your primary care physician for an annual physical. But one doctor argues they could actually be a waste.

    Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School, wrote an editorial for The New England Journal of Medicine arguing against the need for people to have an annual physical.

    “The annual visit frequently becomes a rushed, impersonal, and largely bureaucratic exercise entailing little more than a brief interview focused on a review of health habits, medications, and allergies, supplemented by a perfunctory physical examination and ordering of recommended screening tests and procedures — in essence, checking all the requisite boxes for reimbursement,” Mehrotra writes.

    That’s an intense assessment for a practice that has become a standard of primary care medicine. But Mehrotra says that he decided to write the editorial because the annual physical, in its current form, “isn’t working.”

    “I found that, for 30 years, people have been talking about getting rid of the annual physical and yet it was still being provided,” he says. “It is not necessary for every adult every year.” Mehrotra says that people should seek care depending on their needs. He argues that you may not need an annual visit if you’re following general healthy lifestyle recommendations like maintaining a healthy weight, eating well, and not smoking.

    Mehrotra also says that the annual physical may result in tests on healthy people that can give false positives and may result in additional, costly tests or unnecessary treatment — all just to verify that a person is, in fact, healthy. However, “if you give those tests to someone who is feeling ill, it totally changes the equation,” he says.

    He still recommends undergoing preventive care measures like mammograms, Pap smears, flu shots, and cholesterol screenings, but says people shouldn’t be married to the idea of the annual “specialized mystical visit.”

    But what about detecting cancer or heart disease, which may not come with noticeable symptoms? Unfortunately, Mehrotra says regular physical exams typically don’t pick up on a lot of cancers.(SD-Agencies)