Early Tests Can Prevent Chronic Ills

Abstract

0 LOW-COST mass screening services could help prevent some of the chronic illnesses that send old people to hospitals and nursing homes, witnesses said at a Senate hearing of the Subcommittee on Health of the Elderly. patient may today pay five dollars or more for laboratory services that cost 50 cents or less to perform, Dr. Ralph E. Thiers of the Duke University Medical Center said. He demonstrated a 12-channel blood-testing instrument called an Autoanalyzer for Sen. Maurine Neuberger (D.-Oreg.) who was chairman of the hearing, and others present. would be to the advantage of physicians and their patients if the laboratories would be allowed to do their jobs, freeing the physician for diagnosis and treatment, Dr. Thiers, who is a professor of biochemistry and director of the Duke Clinical Chemistry Laboratory, said. A physician is wasting his training if he supervises the chemists, he added. However, certain groups maintain that the conduct of all laboratory examinations is properly a part of the physician's practice, and the American Medical Association has passed a resolution supporting this stand. The American patient today gets, in the main, mediocre-to-poor quantitative laboratory services because budgets are inadequate to provide needed analyses that could be furnished by such instruments as the Autoanalyzer, he said. Dr. Thiers referred to the genius of Dr. Leonard T. Skeggs Jr. of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, who developed the Autoanalyzer because he was a biochemist in an overburdened clinical laboratory. The Technicon Instruments Corporation perfected the instrument. From one teaspoonful of blood, 12 complicated chemical analyses can be recorded on graph paper in directly usable form. The 12 tests are for sodium, potassium. chloride, carbon dioxide, total protein, albumin, urea, glucose, calcium, bilirubin, alkaline phosphatase, and glutamic oxalectic transaminase. Opposition to multiphasic screening stems from the threat to the current charge structure of medicine, the present disciplinary lines and administrative arrangements, confusion about what is properly a part of the physician's practice, and the lack of enough expert chemists to do the necessary work, Dr. Thiers explained. Multiphasic analysis is not a futuristic dream, he said. It is here today. In spite of the stumbling blocks discussed, I believe multiphasic screening will progress rapidly, break down the barriers and lead to a new era in medicine.