Ever wonder why students don’t just grade themselves?  For your answer, look no further than HealthFair.com’s self-assessed grade:

And yet by any standard other than their own, HealthFair completely flunks the test.  Literally, their “basic package” proposes more “D”-rated tests (and “D” is a failing grade by US Preventive Services Task Force standards) than any vendor we’ve ever seen. They would lose their wellness vendor license tomorrow, except for the fact that wellness vendors don’t need licenses.

The first four all get “D”s.  Here are the screenshots if you don’t believe that any vendor could possibly offer so many inappropriate tests at all, let alone in the “basic” package.

The abdominal aortic ultrasound test is such a stupid (where “stupid” is synonymous with “profitable”) idea for the non-elderly population that the USPSTF doesn’t even bother to say no:

Along with their “D” as a general screening tool, The EKG gets a whopping “I” for individuals at risk, but since HealthFair’s basic package includes no basic tests to see who is at risk, and by law they can’t ask about history, they would still have to screen everyone whether or not they are at risk:

By earning another “I”, the peripheral artery disease test does well by HealthFair’s standards.  The USPSTF concludes that researchers don’t know enough about it to recommend it, which doesn’t stop HealthFair.

As for “hardening of the arteries,” the USPSTF doesn’t bother to grade it due to the fact that no one uses this test as a screen…except wellness vendors.  But even the American Heart Association, not exactly shy when it comes to screening people for cardiac disease whose treatment can enrich their members who treat it, disses this test:

Speaking of D-Rated tests, sorry, guys.  If you want a D-rated PSA screen — a screen not even recommended by its own inventor — you have to insist that your employer buy HealthFair’s “advanced” package:

Give your employees wellness that always earns an “A”

That brings us to the H Pylori screen, Healthfair’s groundbreaking, earth-shattering, pushing-the-envelope leap forward in the wellness vendor competition to out-stupid one another.

Where to start…

First, the US Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t bother to offer a recommendation on it, largely because no self-respecting doctor would ever screen patients for this.  Shame on the USPSTF for consistently failing to anticipate all the ways in which wellness vendors can misunderstand basic clinical science!

Second, most of us who harbor H Pylori have no symptoms.  So why screen for something that’s not causing problems?   That’s why this is a test, not a screen.  If you have an ulcer or symptoms that suggest an ulcer, go to the doctor.  Even then, the doctor probably won’t even bother to test you, since most people get relief simply from well-tolerated, commonly used, proton pump-inhibitor medications–some of which don’t even require a prescription.  It is only if the first-line medications fail that most doctors will even test you.

Third, there is a significant school of thought that says H. Pylori is beneficial.  Screening us for something we’re better off having in our bodies represents a new frontier in the wellness industry’s answer to overdiagnosis, which we call hyperdiagnosis.

Fourth ironically, given the wellness industry’s obsession with employees’ weights, it is even slightly possible that killing off H. Pylori contributes to weight gain.

Fifth, what exactly are we supposed to do, if it turns out we harbor H. Pylori?  Get a course of antibiotics to clear the bacteria out of our system?  That’s a great idea.  We’ve always maintained that one of the problems with America’s healthcare system is that patients don’t get to take enough antibiotics.

The good news for the pharmaceutical industry is due to the nature of H Pyroli, hiding in our stomach mucus, it takes a lot of antibiotics to ferret it out, plus a bunch of other pills.  Is this a great country or what?

Sixth, the H Pylori tests themselves are among the most complex, unhelpful  and inaccurate commonly used tests in existence.

Finally, half the world’s population has it.   Given the expense and inaccuracy of the test and the prevalence of the bacterium, why not eliminate the middle step and just put all your employees on antibiotics?

One of us is a screaming libertarian. And even he thinks the cowboys that populate the wellness industry need to be reigned in with some regulation, before they screen the American workforce to death.  The regulation would be very straightforward:  employers and vendors must disclose the USPSTF recommendations to employees before making them take these tests. If after this disclosure, a few employees still insist on getting these D-rated or off-the-charts-inappropriate screens, congratulations!  Your screening program will have just done something useful:  identified employees who are totally incapable of making an intelligent decision.

To those of you who are reading this and thinking: “Haven’t I heard this song before?”, the answer is, you have.  HealthFair is the “Intel Inside” for the screening jihad offered by SSM Healthcare, the Sisters of Saint Mary health system we “profiled” a few weeks ago, thus once again proving that wellness mantra: great minds aren’t the only ones that think alike.