There’s been growing awareness in recent years of the risk posed to patients from exposure to tests and treatments that were not crucial for them and may expose them to risk. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) defines overdiagnosis as labeling people as having disease or conditions in cases that would not cause them harm if left undiscovered, creating new diagnoses by medicalizing ordinary life experiences or lowering thresholds to define illness without evidence of improved outcomes. People get no medical benefit from overdiagnosis, which may experience physical, psychological and financial harm, NLM said.
NLM also in 2022 defined “overtreatment” as being procedures done too frequently or excessively often as a result of “overdiagnosis.”
“Overdiagnosis has been around as long as there has been diagnosis. But its recognition as a specific concept is a relatively new phenomenon,” wrote Steve Woloshin, M.D., and Barnett Kramer, M.D., in a 2022 opinion article in The BMJ.
Woloshin and Kramer have been among the leaders in efforts to get doctors and patients to reassess how aggressively some medical conditions must be treated, or even in some cases if a reading on a test truly means someone has a disease. There’s been a reassessment, for example, of how often men should be tested for prostate cancer and in what circumstances they need aggressive treatment for this condition.
The ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely campaign represents efforts by dozens of medical societies to reduce unnecessary medical tests, treatments and procedures. JAMA Internal Medicine’s longstanding ”Less is More “ series highlights the ways that overuse of medical care can harm patients.