The misunderstanding of overdiagnosis

In December 2017, the NEJM’s national corespondent, Lisa Rosenbaum, published an article “The Less-Is-More Crusade — Are We Overmedicalizing or Oversimplifying?” The article aimed a broadside against those who are campaigning against the overuse of medicine, and the over diagnosis of treatment. This week in the BMJ we’ve published a rebuttal to that article, and in this podcast we talk to Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz - both professors at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Steve and Lisa’s article carefully deconstructs some of the ideas advanced by Rosenbaum, but in this podcast we discuss how much separate camps are forming in this debate - and how to have a constructive dialogue across that divide. Read Steve and Lisa's essay https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2035 Iona Heath's essay - The role of fear in overdiagnosis https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g6123 Stacy Carter's interview about moral shocks https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/preventing-overdiagnosis-2017-stacy-carter-on-the-culture-of-overmedicalisation