On the US News & World report website, Dr. Kenny Lin writes as a physician and a concerned observer about “Dangers of Incidentaloma: Why To Think Twice Before Getting a CT Scan.”
It’s an important issue. Give it a look.
Lin’s blog, “The Common Sense Family Doctor,” is also worth visiting. Recently he cited one of my alltime favorite essays, “The Last Well Person,” by Dr. Clifton Meador, who wrote in 1994:
“The demands of the public for definitive wellness are colliding with the public’s belief in a diagnostic system that can find only disease. A public in dogged pursuit of the unobtainable, combined with clinicians whose tools are powerful enough to find very small lesions, is a setup for diagnostic excess. And false positives are the arithmetically certain result of applying a disease-defining system to a population that is mostly well. … If the behavior of doctors and the public continues unabated, eventually every well person will be labeled sick. Like the invalids, we will all be assigned to one diagnosis-related group or another. How long will it take to find every single lesion in every person? Who will be the last well person?”
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
In researching this @bopinon column on medical misinformation, I reached @garyschwitzer who said the information pollution problem goes back to the 1980s, when PR people started tempting reporters with easy, uplifting, prepackaged hype.
https://t.co/ch8rz2MqY4
https://t.co/4AeZZXNhiE
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