One of the four areas of focus for development of the new National Preventive Health Strategy is “current and emerging opportunities in cancer and chronic disease population screening”, and Health Minister Greg Hunt has sought advice on whether a lung cancer screening program should be introduced. It is timely [...]
Researchers in Australia have developed and tested a conversation guide for pharmacists conducting medication reviews with older people. It addresses matters such as general health understanding, health priorities for medicines, the person’s goals and fears, views about what activities are important to them, and making [...]
Much testing in medicine is aimed at healthy people to facilitate the early detection of health conditions. However, there is growing evidence that early detection is a double-edged sword that may cause harm in the form of overdiagnosis. The media can be seen as a [...]
Today, we are launching a new series that investigates how to reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment in Australia and globally. It is being published as a collaboration between Wiser Healthcare and Croakey. To follow the TOO MUCH of a Good Thing series, bookmark this link, and follow #WiserHealthcare on Twitter. Below, Professor Stacy Carter, [...]
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a primary myocardial disorder which can present at any age. Although the prevalence is estimated to be 1 in 500 in adults, it is far less common in young children. HCM is frequently caused by pathogenic variants in the sarcomere genes [...]
Overuse of care that does not confer benefit to patients and wastes limited resources is being increasingly recognised as a major healthcare problem. The preferred measure of overuse of a specific intervention is applying an evidence‐ or consensus‐based measure of inappropriateness directly to the medical [...]
The problem of the overuse of healthcare services and how to address it has gained increasing policy and research attention over the past decade.Overuse encompasses terms like ‘low‐value care’, ‘unnecessary care’ and ‘too much medicine’ and refers to care that delivers no or very little [...]
Early diagnosis of dementia is a challenging issue for primary care physicians, largely due to concerns arising from the fragile balance of harms and benefits, the imprecision of some assessment tools, psychological distress, reduced quality of life and financial burden. Multiple countries including Australia, the [...]
Low back pain is the single biggest cause of years lived with disability worldwide, and a major challenge to international health systems. In 2018, the Lancet Low Back Pain Series Working Group identified a global problem of mismanagement of low back pain. The group documented the [...]
When a doctor performs an echocardiogram, about one per cent of people will be found to have a 'spongy heart' — typically benign, but sometimes associated with other heart problems. When a more sensitive MRI test is used, the number of people with spongy heart shoots as [...]