Oversimplifying Overdiagnosis

Oversimplifying the Greenhouse

A recent paper by James Hansen and colleagues from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has received a lot of attention from the media and from industrial lobbyists. This paper, entitled ‘Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario’ was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, 2000. As an example of how the press has interpreted...

Oversimplifying Sex Differences in the Brain

Overuse, Overdose, Overdiagnosis… Overreaction?

When x-rays were first discovered, the harmful effects of radiation had to be manifest in the early users before they were known. Today, radiation protection and safety have been established and the effects of radiation, as well as its risks, are known. Even so, medical radiation, in particular the growth in the use of computed tomography (CT), has resulted in soaring radiation doses received b...

Overdiagnosis of Disease

M OST OF US LEARNED THAT BRAIN HERniation is about as close to death as a living patient can get. But a clinically important proportion of patients with head computed tomography (CT)-defined herniation are awake and alert (personal communication, Kelli O’Laughlin, MD, MPH, December 1, 2011). Is herniation far less grave than we have always thought? Does this mean that we need to order even more...

Overdiagnosis and overtreatment

claim that our critique of the randomized screening trials has little merit; that there is no reason to believe that the Canadian study was of better quality than the New York Health Insurance Plan (HIP) study or the Two-County study; and that the prior consensus on mammography was correct. However, their review suffers from erroneous assumptions and biased statistical analyses, and their quota...