Excessive diagnosis epidemic is harmful to the mental health of patients

However, what happened now is that we have an enormous increase in autism, and it has no effect in the direction of the river course to make children better. We must see a little happier population, but all we see is worse than mental health. We have done something in good faith, but there is no evidence that it works.

The reason for not doing is that when you reach the very mild end of a set of behavioral or educational problems, you have a balanced act between the benefit of the diagnosis with the help that you can get, and the disadvantages of diagnosis, which tells the child that they suffer from an abnormal brain. What does this do for the child’s belief? How is it stigmatized? How do you affect the formation of their identity? We thought it would be useful to tell children of this, but the statistics and the result indicate that they are not useful.

You are also worried about another aspect of diagnostic aspects, which is excessive detection. One of the examples that you give in the book is related to modern cancer examination programs that discover the disease in early stages and adopt. But so far there is little evidence that this is actually beneficial to patients.

Each cancer examination program will get the treatment of some people when they do not need to treat them. This will always be the case. What we do is desperate is that we want to make sure that we keep the number of people who have been excessively diagnosed and the number of people who need treatment. However, the more you perform these tests, the more people who were diagnosed more than the diagnosis. I read in Cochrane that if you examine 2000 women, you save one life, and you are treating somewhere between 10 or 20 women. You are always more treatment than people than you already saved. So the suggestion that we must do more these tests before we master the meaningless for me.

I scan a multiple brain per week and many of them show cross results. Although I am a neurologist and see the brain’s tests all the time, I don’t know what to do half of them. We only do not know how to properly explain these tests. We need to pay more attention to detecting symptoms early, rather than trying to detect diseases that can never be advanced.

In some types of cancer – distinct cancer, for example – chosen patients can Watching waiting Instead of treatment. Should this be the base for early detection?

If you are going to examine – and I do not want people not to go to the proposed offers – you need to understand the uncertainty and realization that you do not have to panic. Of course, at the moment when you hear some cancer cells, panic begins, want them and want maximum treatment. But in reality, in medicine, a lot of decisions can be made slowly. There are monitoring waiting programs.

I want to suggest to people that before you go to the examination, you know that these doubts exist, so that you can decide before the test get back positively what you think you want to do, and then you can take time to think about it after that, and you can request a dreamer waiting program.

I think one of the solutions is to call these abnormal cells that we find to examine something other than “cancer”. The moment you hear this word, the immediate reaction to people is to remove it, because they believe that they will die from it. Thermal waiting is just something that people find it difficult to do.

Listen to Susan Osoulvan talking in Wire On March 18 at Kings Place, London. Get tickets in Health.WIRED.com.