The growing case for doing less: How harmless cancers are being overdiagnosed in America

Anxious, sad, young woman wearing hospital gown looks down. (Credit: Getty Images)

In 2009, Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon and oncology specialist in San Francisco, co-published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggesting that it was time to rethink routine screening for breast and prostate cancer. The current approach, she wrote, wasn’t reducing aggressive or late-stage disease as much as had been hoped. Instead, it was leading to overdiagnosis.

Almost 15 years later, “The amount of hate mail has gone down,” says Esserman, now the director of the University of California San Francisco Breast Care Center. “But what has happened is that women have voted with their feet. People have flown in from all over the world and all over the country for me to do nothing when they have DCIS.”