I’ve discussed in a few prior posts (for example here and here) the potential downsides of doing too much testing in medicine. This is an important topic, and one that can be difficult to discuss. Patients – quite reasonably – want to feel that their doctors are listening to them, and running all reasonable medical tests to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Any discussion of how medical testing can sometimes actually be detrimental to your health can therefore risk coming off as being callous and uncaring. “What do you mean I shouldn’t be tested for disease x?,” a patient may think. “Don’t you want me to know if I have it or not?” Unfortunately it’s not so simple.
Being dismissive of patient concerns and not ordering appropriate tests can harm or even kill patients, but so too can overtesting and acting as though medical tests are infallible. Getting the balance between these two competing problems correct is very difficult, and lies at the heart of good medical practice.
To help you better understand some of nuances of why overtesting and overdiagnosing can be a problem, I recommend listening to this podcast, in which British neurologist Suzzanne O’Sulivan discusses her recent book on this very topic:
