Preventing Overdiagnosis

Overdiagnosis happens when people get a diagnosis they don’t need. It can happen when people without symptoms are diagnosed and then treated for a disease that won’t actually cause them any symptoms, and it can happen for people whose symptoms or life experiences are given a diagnostic label which will bring them more harm than good.

Although hard to believe, there’s growing scientific evidence suggesting many people are being overdiagnosed across a lot of different conditions, from asthma to breast cancer, from high blood pressure to low bone density. Fierce debates are raging in many specialist areas, from psychiatry to kidney medicine, over whether the boundaries defining illness have been pushed too wide and whether too many people are being turned into patients unnecessarily.

To learn more about the nature and extent of the problem and how to prevent it, an international scientific conference called Preventing Overdiagnosis will take place on 10-12 September 2013 in the United States, hosted by The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, in partnership with one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the BMJ, the leading New-York based consumer organisation Consumer Reports, and Bond University.

A call for abstracts was issued in November 2012, and submissions closed on March 15, 2013, with decisions to be announced late April. A draft program appears here. If you are interested in attending or want to receive more information about the conference, please sign up for updates.

Videos

Watch this new video from the BMJ about the harms of overtreatment.......