Quotes About Overdiagnosis

DSM-IV unwittingly contributed to three new false epidemics in psychiatry—the overdiagnosis of attention deficit, autism, and adult bipolar disorder.

For all the hoopla you read and hear about the overdiagnosis of ADD and the overuse of medication-indeed, serious problems in certain places—the more costly problem is the opposite: millions of people, especially adults, have ADD but don't know about it and there fore get no help at all.

What is most certain about screening mammography in the United States is that it leads to a lot of false alarms: worrisome mammograms, and yet subsequent testing—another mammogram, an ultrasound, an MRI, and/or a biopsy—ultimately finds no cancer. For example, among 1,000 American women age fifty screened annually for a decade, how many will have at least one false alarm? Somewhere between 490 and 670. And 70 to 100 will be biopsied to prove they don't have cancer.

Of course, I'm guilty of oversimplification here. First, there are real-world legal concerns: doctors aren't punished for overdiagnosis, but they are punished for failing to diagnose. So it's hard for doctors to ignore incidentalomas. Second,