The alarming tendency to overuse preventive health services

” …if we want to prevent overdiagnosis and other potential harms related to excessive, not evidence-based, use of medical tests by healthy people, we should start designing strategies of communication to explain to our populations what is meant by potential harms, false positives, and overdiagnosis. Only by understanding these meanings and knowing the probabilities of being benefited or harmed, will the patient be able to make a shared decision and to avoid a consumeristic model of medical tests utilization. ”

Read Overuse of medical tests—a new health risk factor?
by Carlos Martins, 24 Apr, 2015.