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Training DazeWhy do doctors fixate on diagnosis, not treatment?

By Darshak Sanghavi
Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008, at 1:06 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

When doctors are freed from commercial pressure, how well do they perform? We've grown accustomed to scapegoating pharmaceutical companies for health-care ills—consider movies like The Constant Gardener and the recent New York Times Magazine exposé by a psychiatrist paid by drug makers. The implication is that if left alone by money-grubbing drug companies and health insurers, physicians make the right decisions on behalf of their patients.

Not so fast. It turns out that improving the quality of health care has only a little to do with drug companies. Their influence is a symptom of a deeper underlying pathology. The real trouble is that doctors—somewhat paradoxically—are simply not focused on actually treating disease.

A key indicator of this problem emerged last October, when a team of researchers led by Rita Mangione-Smith reviewed children's medical records from 12 major American cities and found that fewer than half of children got the correct medical care during doctor visits. The researchers asked basic questions such as these: Did doctors properly inform mothers to continue feeding infants who had diarrhea? Was HIV testing offered to all adolescents diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease? Was a follow-up visit scheduled after a child's medication changed for chronic asthma? These were all simple things doctors should have been doing yet weren't. (A similar study of adult quality of care was published in 2003 with similar results.)

This seems absurd. Physicians are some of the most hypereducated professionals around, with eight years of higher education, followed by three to 10 years of residency and subspecialty training over thousands of hours. They also must pass some of the most exacting and complex licensing exams ever written, including at least four separate tests requiring weeks of dedicated study to achieve board certification. And yet, according to studies like Mangione-Smith's, most doctors in practice don't pass muster in administering optimal care for elementary conditions like infant diarrhea. What is going on?

There are at least two explanations. First, clinical training in primary care—including pediatrics, internal medicine, and family practice—excessively focuses on the diagnostic hunt rather than the more routine rounds of treatment that follow. It's tempting to think that most doctors are detectives nailing baffling diagnoses, like Hugh Laurie's character on House. In part, this view of medicine accounts for the success of Jerome Groopman's book How Doctors Think, which explores how wrong diagnoses occur. In almost every educational venue—from morning teaching sessions for residents to the weekly case conference featured in the New England Journal of Medicine—medical trainees spend hours learning about how to diagnose rare ailments. And then, abruptly, discussion ends, as though treatment were an afterthought.

The not-so-subtle subtext: Medicine is about the exciting search for a diagnosis, and any old doctor can write a prescription once the real work is done. This same bias pervades insurance rules. To be paid at the appropriate level, physicians must exhaustively document all sorts of irrelevant diagnostic data—such as a rectal exam in toddlers seen for a comprehensive asthma evaluation—rather than the rationale for the treatment they prescribe.

On a separate but related front, medical education today fixates on acquiring knowledge that is largely unrelated to patient care. Consider the college prerequisites to attend medical school (for example, physics and organic chemistry) and the morass of molecular biology, anatomy lessons, and pharmacology that follows and must be committed to memory. Of course, a general foundation is important. However, the sheer abundance crowds out an important—in fact, the only—skill that matters in treating a patient: how to critically appraise published clinical trials. Few doctors ever read them. In effect, medicine has become a priesthood of practitioners who never review or learn to interpret the Bible to minister to their flock; they instead rely on secondhand wisdom. Or, worse, on Google.

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Darshak Sanghavi is a pediatric cardiologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is the author of A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.
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