A yearly check-in with a doctor seems undeniably prudent. He or she can listen to your heart, check your blood pressure and help you nip any looming health issues in the bud.

But while annual well visits are a familiar part of the health care system, a growing pile of evidence finds that for healthy people without any symptoms, these yearly physician exams are a waste of time and money—and in some cases may do more harm than good.

One large-scale review, published in 2012, found that annual physical exams do nothing to improve a person’s disease and mortality risks. Another recent study found a little evidence that annual physicals could reassure some people of their good health, and therefore reduce worry. But it did not find that these exams save lives or prevent disease.As a result of these lackluster findings, some experts have called for an end to annual physicals.“

If you’re healthy, there’s every reason to believe these visits make no difference,” says Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of health care management and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “Doing a bunch of unnecessary tests and taking up valuable time for people who are well—that’s not useful.”

But if you have health problems, don’t skip your annual. “All of this discussion about annual physicals is not for people with health problems,” Emanuel says. If you’re sick or symptomatic, or if you have a family history of disease, then “yes, you should be seeing a doctor,” he says.

In 1979, the Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination was the first organization to recommend against annual physical examinations.[1] Since then, the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), and the U.S. Public Health Service have all agreed that routine annual physical exams for healthy adults should be abandoned and instead doctors should focus their attentions, during the time spent with their patients, on the few problems that they can really help.[2-5]

Despite unanimous agreement by major health policy makers worldwide, a survey published in July of 2005 in the Annals of Internal Medicine revealed that nearly two-thirds of doctors still recommend annual physicals.[6] The main reason given for this contradiction with the evidence is that doctors want to avoid having dissatisfied patients – doctors fear patients would be disgruntled by this lack of "proper medical care."

This is a valid concern since two-thirds of patients also consider the annual physical an important part of their health care and may not return to doctors who believe otherwise.[5] In addition to the hope that an annual physical will ward off future problems, one common reason given for this kind of routine visit is to get to know their doctor better. People fear becoming ill and having to be cared for by a doctor who is unfamiliar to them and unknowledgeable about their underlying health.

In 2012, the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of medical researchers who systematically review the world’s biomedical research, analyzed 14 randomized controlled trials with over 182,000 people followed for a median of nine years that sought to evaluate the benefits of routine, general health checkups — that is, visits to the physician for general health and not prompted by any particular symptom or complaint.

The unequivocal conclusion: the appointments are unlikely to be beneficial. Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered, studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease. And the checkups consume billions, although no one is sure exactly how many billions because of the challenge of measuring the additional screenings and follow-up tests.

This lack of evidence is the main reason the United States Preventive Services Task Force — an independent group of experts making evidence-based recommendations about the use of preventive services — does not have a recommendation on routine annual health checkups. The Canadian guidelines have recommended against these exams since 1979.

"Screening is all about pre-test probabilities. If your pre-test probability is really really really low, you don't need to screen! So the smart move is get yourself into the really really really low pre-test probability category and you can forget about it. That's how you win the game of health! It's by making your risk of coronary heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer -- all these problems -- so low that you can just forget about it. You know, it's kind of like a joke: Psalm 23 though: "I walk through the valley of the shadow of disease, I shall fear no disease because I got the vegan diet on my side, okay!"