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Over Diagnosis Essay

1364 Words6 Pages

Medicine is a vital aspect of our lives and can determine how long as well as how comfortable we may live. The fact that medicine is important is not ground breaking news as this belief is widely known throughout the world. However, a fact that most people don’t know is that some medicine is not necessary. The use of more medicine that is needed is called overtreatment which is caused by over-diagnosis. The fact that most people do not consider these two issues a serious threat and is not widely known is what lead me delve deeper into the topic. For this research project, my aim was to discover if over diagnosis and overtreatment were unavoidable problems or if there was a solution to it and therefore see if there was a way to save the lives lost due to the two issues. I began with several questions I hoped to answer: (1) Why do people make the decision to be over treated? (2) Are these issues unavoidable? (3) Can we fix these problems without causing more harm? (4) What are the underlying factors that lead to both overtreatment and over-diagnosis? And (5) if there is a solution will it be a lasting solution or a Band-Aid on a bigger problem? These …show more content…

The bibliography contains different kinds of sources: two articles form scholarly journals; one book; and two articles from internet sites devoted to studying medicine and how the body works. These sources together showed me that there was an answer to the overtreatment problem. They showed me why people choose to be over treated as well as the consequences of these choices. Extremely valuable for my research was the book written by H. Gilbert., Schwartz, and Woloshin which gave me hard statistics on the outcome of overtreatment and the journal article by Adolphs which gave me clear insight as to why people make the choices they do and the effects fear has on their decision making skills showing an underlying problem to

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