While diagnostic testing can be a big boon when used intelligently, lab tests and scans are often abused, misused and overused by doctors today.
This is partly because the clinical training in private medical colleges is very poor. Junior doctors aren’t taught to take a history , and they never learn how to do a proper clinical examination. They are taught to rely on test reports, because these are so much easier to order – and so much more profitable for them to ask for !
This problem gets exacerbated in corporate hospitals, where tests are a profit center, and doctors are ordered to order many of them, in order to meet their targets !