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.
GPs have increased their test ordering by more than 50%. Imaging for back pain is one of the key culprits.
lauren rushing/Flickr
The evidence suggests too much medicine is doing us harm, particularly when treating knee pain, back pain, chest pain and screening for prostate cancer.
Ineffective care exposes patients to complications and side-effects and waste precious health care resources.
Jim Young/Reuters
To avoid ineffective treatments, we need a new way to identify and reduce questionable care. A new Grattan Institute report shows how to do it.
Biomedical science has made our lives immeasurably better, but it’s time to accept that too much medicine can be as harmful as too little.
Kathea Pinto/Flickr
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.
Acute non-specific low back pain is a very common problem that usually gets better without any treatment.
David Rabbit Wallace/Flickr
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…
Most people overestimate the benefits and underestimate the harms of medical intervention.
Barbara M./Flickr
“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…
Whether the harms of statins outweigh their benefits depends on how you balance them up.
AJ Cann/Flickr
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…
Labelling a risk factor as a medical condition stimulates the therapeutic reflex to treat, which may have minimal or no benefit yet risk all the adverse effects.
John Chamberlain
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…
There’s virtually no difference in cancer incidence between women aged 20-24 years who screened are and those who are not.
Spirit-Fire/Flickr
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