Every medical organization comes up with guidelines that benefits their members. The American Urological Association has more aggressive prostate cancer screening guidelines, resulting in increasing business for urologists in the form of prostate biopsies.
DrRich gives a pointed example with the American Heart Association’s ADHD recommendation:
In making this recommendation the cardiologists of the AHA have attempted to encroach upon the turf of the pediatricians, ostensibly to save the lives of innocent children, but in a manner that will inevitably increase business for cardiologists by a) generating hundreds of thousands of ECGs for them to interpret at $25 – $50 a pop, and b) generating tens of thousands of echocardiograms and other cardiac tests that will be necessary to evaluate all the equivocal (and to a very large extent false positive) ECGs that will result from this routine screening, while c) explicitly leaving the pediatricians themselves out of the process.
Guidelines from professional organizations generally should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Unbiased guidelines, like the USPSTF, should be the gold standard instead.
