Tag Archives: overdiagnosis

Overdiagnosis is harming patients

It’s the downside of always improved diagnostic procedures. With science progress and more information available, many information pieces are unvalidated and have a duobtful prognostic and therapeutic value. They even harm patients, possibly by further and unnnecesssary (dangerous) procedures but also increased insurance rates. The problem has been excellently described 2 years ago by Ray Moynihan, Jenny Doust, and David Henry in a BMJ.

Bildschirmfoto 2014-07-22 um 14.46.17

Only recently I learned that there is now even a conference series how top stop harming the healthy. An own pubmed analysis showed zero interest in 1970, then gradually increasing until 2010 up to about 100 papers/year while now doubling in the last 3 years.