Evidence Brief: Role of the Annual Comprehensive Physical Examination in the Asymptomatic Adult
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The routine annual comprehensive physical examination (PE) became a fixture in American medical practice in the 1940's. By the 1980's many influential professional groups, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) and the Canadian Task Force on Periodic Health, recommended that this approach be replaced by periodic screening, counseling and PE tailored to a patient's age, sex, risk factors, and symptoms as elicited by the medical history and review of systems (Oboler 2002). Furthermore, these recommendations tacitly or explicitly endorse the concept that, for screening purposes, only those components of the PE that accurately and effectively detect conditions for which early diagnosis is known to lead to improved patient outcomes should be routinely offered.Consistent with this tailored and evidence-based approach, Medicare currently offers a free initial “Welcome to Medicare” visit which includes a medical history, recommended immunizations and screenings and “further tests depending on your health and medical history”. The only components of the PE recommended for everyone are measurement of blood pressure, vision, weight and height ( www.medicare.gov/welcometomedicare/visit.html ).Nevertheless, most adults in the US believe that annual comprehensive physical exams are important; a 2002 study showed that more than 90% endorse the value of routine examination of the heart, lungs, abdomen, reflexes and prostate (Oboler 2002). Moreover, as recently as 2005, many physicians also endorse the complete annual physical examination for a variety of reasons including perceived benefits to the physician-patient relationship, patient expectations for a yearly “physical,” fear of malpractice litigation, and compensation (Frame 1995, Prochazka 2005). The purpose of this review is to determine whether the routine annual physical examination results in improved outcomes for asymptomatic adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".