Health checks offered to millions of people over 40 are a waste of time, says the UK's leading GP.
Dr Clare Gerada, chair of the Royal College of GPs, says the government is promoting its NHS Health Check programme "against good evidence".
Her comments come after The Times newspaper published a letter from Danish researchers criticising the programme.
The Nordic Cochrane Centre group found health MoTs did not reduce deaths.
In England, people aged 40-74 are offered a free health check.
The initiative, launched in 2009, is designed to spot conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes by looking for silent risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol.
Ministers have said the scheme could save 650 lives a year.
But Danish researchers are questioning the policy and say health checks have no proven benefits.
Their review, published in October 2012, looked at health checks offered in a number of countries, including some pilot trials in the UK a decade or more ago, though not the post-2009 programme.
It concluded that general health checks failed to benefit patients and could instead cause them unnecessary worry and treatment.
Dr Gerada of the RCGP shares these concerns.
She said: "Governments seem to be promoting this against good evidence.
"They [health checks] are not based on good evidence. They are pulling in an awful lot of people who have nothing wrong with them. And the very people you would want to be dragging in do not attend."
She said the money involved would be better spent on targeted intervention.
"We should be focusing on the hard to reach groups instead and policies like plain packaging for cigarettes and minimum pricing for alcohol."
The Department of Health says the NHS Health Check programme is based on expert guidance that is continually reviewed.
A spokeswoman for Public Health England said: "We are establishing an Expert Clinical and Scientific Advisory Panel that will provide oversight of the NHS Health Check programme.
"This panel will be responsible for reviewing emerging evidence and research needs. It will also promote future research, development and evaluation of this programme."
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