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Too Much Medicine Is Bad For Our Health

Too Much Medicine Is Bad For Our Health

–Aldous Huxley






Why the big change? Definitive long-term studies prove that the test doesn’t save lives and instead ruins them by triggering invasive interventions with painful complications. Screening is usually too late to stop fast spreading tumors and too good at identifying slow growing ones that don’t count and are better left alone. If they live long enough, the majority of men will develop an incidental and benign prostate cancer before they die from something else. Picking up these tumours early causes great grief for no return.


•The technology is out of hand. If we do enough CT scans we can find structural abnormalities in just about everyone. But most findings are incidental and don’t have any real clinical meaning. Paradoxically, lots of otherwise healthy people will get dangerous cancers from the CT radiation that served no useful purpose.

•Doctors have gotten into the habit of ordering huge batteries of laboratory tests and treating the results while ignoring what is best for this particular patient. There needs to be retraining of those already in practice, a change in how medicine is taught to new doctors, and a realignment of financial incentives to promote best care—not excessive care.

•Except for hospice care, it has become almost impossible to die in a dignified, humane, and cost effective way. Hospitals have become frenetic torture chambers that make dying much worse than death and cost an obscene fortune.

Curing medical excess will not be easy. Harmful overtesting and overtreating is promoted and protected by the enormous economic and political power of the medical industrial complex. Here’s just a beginning list of what needs to be done:



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