Many docs feel they’re delivering too much care

Your doctor may secretly think you're making too many office visits and getting too many drugs and tests. A survey of primary-care doctors conducted in 2009 finds that 42% of the 627 respondents believed the patients in their own practice were getting too much care. Just 6% of doctors believed their patients were getting too little care. (The rest thought the level of care was just right.) And 28% of the doctors thought they themselves were practicing more aggressively than they would prefer to. The response rate to the mailed survey was 70%, suggesting this is a topic of interest for doctors — as well as for a health-care system struggling to control costs while helping to improve people's health. The survey, the results of which were published in the latest Archives of Internal Medicine, found 76% of doctors blamed malpractice worries for their over-aggressive care.