Harm doesn’t just come in the form of side-effects or further testing. The “cons” of any treatment also include the costs, which can be financial, emotional, and the costs of the individual’s time.
The evidence suggests too much medicine is doing us harm, particularly when treating knee pain, back pain, chest pain and screening for prostate cancer.
By forgetting that medicine postpones death rather than saving lives, we persuade ourselves it might somehow keep extending our life and come to view death as a failure of medicine.
Across 38 years in tobacco control, I have been asked countless times in media interviews if I ever smoked. It’s often an early question. I always unhesitatingly explain that I did: I stopped in my mid…
“It might do me some good and it won’t hurt to give it a go.” How often have you heard a phrase like this? Most people have naïve optimism about medical care. That’s the finding of a systematic review…
A panel convened by medical journal BMJ to investigate whether it was right to correct rather than retract two pieces featuring a mistake about side effects from statins has endorsed the journal’s decision…
Anyone, it seems, can create an epidemic. Witness a recent article in the Fairfax papers that provides “startling” news about the large number of Australians with high cholesterol who don’t even know they…
Women in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will all soon be advised to start screening for cervical cancer at 25 years, and those aged between 50 and 64 years to screen every five years rather…
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne