Last week, many Australians woke up to David Koch having prostate cancer screening tests on Channel Seven's Sunrise program. "Just try and relax there a bit," a urologist said to the 61-year-old while he was lying on his side, trousers around his knees, having a digital rectal [...]
Advice is mounting to warn Australians against arthroscopic knee surgery, especially for patients with osteoarthritis who are aged over 50. President of the Australian Rheumatology Association Professor Rachelle Buchbinder said it could be doing more harm than good...
Anne Ashford flinches when she begins to recall the painful "grinding and grating" in her swollen knees when her osteoarthritis was at its worst about seven years ago. Her first surgeon booked her in for arthroscopic knee surgery, but it had to be postponed because [...]
One of the biggest challenges in medicine is how to offer hope without hype. Designing personalised treatments based on the science of the human genome will doubtless bring benefits, particularly for those with rare genetic conditions. But overpromoting the promise risks a tsunami of unwarranted [...]
Want to see a group of parents shudder? Whisper that your kid has “pinkeye.” That one little word evokes images of ocular goop cutting a swath through a pre-K class like a lion through a herd of gazelles. And as it turns out, how that [...]
It’s easy to assume the earlier women are screened for breast cancer, the better. And a recent US study, which found screening women with mammography from the age of 40 saved the most lives, generated headlines around the world...
Major health groups are calling for a national action plan to address overdiagnosis, signalling a mainstream recognition of the issue...
Five prominent Australian healthcare organisations are calling for a national plan to stop overdiagnosis and overtreatment. They issued a statement outlining how some medical conditions are being diagnosed too often, and that the practice is causing harm...
Prominent Australian health bodies are calling for a national plan to stop over diagnosis and overtreatment. A statement, endorsed by organisations including the College of General Practitioners, says the practice is causing harm. Breast cancer screening and tests for prostate cancer are among the culprits.
Receiving a diagnosis of a dreaded disease is surely one of the saddest things that can ever happen to us. But what if some of those diagnoses were unnecessary? Growing evidence suggests doctors are diagnosing many diseases far too frequently, and this problem of "over-diagnosis" is [...]