Soaring rates of diagnoses in various illnesses such as cancer and diabetes have stimulated a debate about whether medicine has an “overdiagnosis” problem. The claim is that individuals may be prematurely diagnosed with conditions that, although meeting criteria for a disease, will never cause symptoms or death during a patient’s lifetime.
Discussions of this problem in the world of physical medicine have mainly been described as compassionate, arising from concerns that many so-called diagnoses might be unnecessary (does being pre-diabetic really mean you are ill?) or even harmful (the worried well being driven to seek needless and possibly damaging surgical interventions). Now that there are ever-more sensitive screening tests, and access to predictive genetic information, are doctors handing out too many unnecessary sicknotes?
