Why Doctors Are Ordering Too Many CT Scans and MRIs

February 25, 2011

CTs and MRIs routinely change the course of medical care, often for the better. But their use has become so routine that their lifesaving benefits are being increasingly overshadowed by the risks of overuse. Medical imaging is the fastest-growing source of cost inflation (see PDF) in the Medicare program. Meanwhile, the real value of so much testing has been widely questioned in scientific literature: imaging rates are going up, but doctors are not diagnosing (or necessarily misdiagnosing) more diseases. (TIME)