Opinion | Unnecessary vitamins and scans turn us into fake patients

Women who become unwanted pregnant because influencers falsely claim that the contraceptive pill is poisonous, and patients who suffer from severe nerve pain due to excessive vitamin intake: these are situations that colleagues recently experienced in the consulting room. Each time a direct result of ‘fake care’. Companies, Dutch celebrities and influencers sell this fake care: products or services that are wrongly claimed to promote health. In some cases, this fake care is even harmful to health. Medical fraud not only harms consumers, it undermines our healthcare system.

I experience another form of fake care myself. More and more often I see a radiological report of the ‘cock scan’: a very expensive head-to-toe MRI scan, intended for wealthy private individuals who want to have their body scanned without there being a medical need for this.

It seems like there has been a sickening amount of focus on our own health. Because of the fear of becoming ill, preventive testing for everything is necessary. A diagnosis must be available for a complaint and then a suitable treatment must be immediately available, preferably ‘biological’ or ‘natural’.

The unpleasant reality is that without a good indication, screening for diseases does more harm than good, that for some complaints no physical explanation can be found and that there is not a proven effective treatment available for every condition. Yet there is a group of people who do not know that. General practitioners and the website Thuisarts.nl can help this group of people. Most patients can be reassured through a good conversation and providing correct medical information. The sad thing: partly thanks to misleading advertisements from providers of fake care, a visit to the GP or Thuisarts.nl is more likely to be skipped.

Mallet

“Measuring is simply knowing,” says former professional cyclist Maarten Ducrot on the website of a commercial laboratory where one can have blood or stool checked without the intervention of a doctor. “Without having to go through the whole merry-go-round first,” he continues.

Checking blood or stool without proper indication, or having the entire body run through the MRI scanner, often produces an abnormal result that later turns out to be incorrect or irrelevant. It also does not rule out the presence of cancer and the blood count may look different tomorrow. Random scanning of the body or checking blood or stool only provides false security, unnecessary stress for the patient and leads to unnecessary doctor and hospital visits. So the merry-go-round is there for a reason.

Another example of bogus care is commercial vitamin clinics that offer supplements and administer injections or infusions of vitamins to anyone who wants them. Partly thanks to Dutch celebrities who advertise for these types of companies on social media, people wrongly think that extra vitamins will reduce their stress or fatigue. Extra vitamins are processed by the body into waste products and are completely pointless. If there is a measurable vitamin deficiency, the question remains whether this also has physical consequences. Furthermore, there is no convincing scientific evidence that a mild vitamin deficiency causes stress or fatigue. In the event that additional vitamins are required, they usually do not need to be administered via injections or an infusion. This can even lead to overdose or infection.

Nowadays there are also companies that sell a self-test for prostate complaints (PSA test) online. What these companies do not say is that this test is not reliable for detecting prostate cancer. An abnormal result more often than not means that there is prostate cancer. The abnormal result may cause unnecessary fear of having cancer and the follow-up tests to rule this out are intensive and not risk-free. In fact, research shows that men who have their PSA levels tested do not live longer than men who never do so. To determine whether determining the PSA value is of added value, you can first consult the selection aid at Thuisarts.nl and then discuss it with your own GP.

The increasing supply of fake care also creates demand. Who can resist the temptation when a neighbor talks about his negative PSA self-test, when a cousin talks about how he started playing football better after a vitamin infusion and a colleague cheerfully indicates that his healthy blood values ​​are indeed healthy? We all want that, right?

Everyone needs care at some point. To facilitate this, it is important that available care is used as appropriately as possible, especially now that care is becoming increasingly scarce. Fake healthcare providers do not contribute to this. On the contrary, they turn consumers into fake patients.

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