Most of the major advances in health and life expectancy over the past couple of hundred years weren’t due to modern medicine, but to public health, political and industrial achievements, such as clean water supply, sewerage separation, having enough food and avoiding war.
Medical procedures that don’t help the patient, overdiagnosis, the ‘medicalisation of normal’… two doctors argue that it has to stop.
Promotional media coverage of early detection tests is an important driver of overdiagnosis. Following research evidence that global media coverage presents the benefits of testing healthy people far more frequently than harms, and gives little coverage to overdiagnosis, we sought to examine journalists’ views on [...]
Guidelines now discourage opioid analgesics for chronic noncancer pain because the benefits frequently do not outweigh the harms. We aimed to determine the proportion of patients with chronic noncancer pain who are prescribed an opioid, the types prescribed and factors associated with prescribing. Database searches [...]
The phrase “to over‐egg the pudding” is a terrific analogy for what is now increasingly common in health care: medical overuse. Cooks would know that if you skimp with the eggs a pudding won't hold together and if you use too many eggs the pudding [...]
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 [...]