A report in the Archives of Internal Medicine in December showed that radiation from CTs cause as much as 29,000 new cancers a year. An article in a recent USA Today discussed this at length. I was pleased that they mentioned that one-third of CT scans aren't medically needed but are performed because of fear of lawsuits. That's funny, I thought that malpractice issues aren't really a major problem in this country? That's what the administration said during the healthcare reform debate. They reinforced this by basically putting nothing about tort reform in the bill itself. But I digress. This issue of over-exposure is real. It brings up the point of overtesting (are CT angiography scans for heart disease worth the risk?) versus rationing. The truth is that we ration all the time due to cost and risk. We also rationalize all the time due to not wanting to be sued. The real war is between rationing vs. rationalizing. Either way someone loses.
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