As for the OP book: Yes, it discusses all the points made above in great detail including asymmetric career risk for providers, the risk of anxiety and the diseases that could follow from that, as well as several more points. In my opinion, the book is worth reading even for those who aren't really interested in their health. However, for those who are, it's especially worth reading. It's also written to the intelligent layman (with numbers and graphs) rather than the typical obnoxious way with narrative examples of patients and travels to visit random experts.
@jacob thanks for the book-tip
As an older person (in Europe) I am targeted many times to join a bowel-cancer search, or go for a free jab against flu. I hardly see my GP and I do not do yearly testing.
The book Overdiagnosed is affirmative since it is clear, objective and convincing to give me a right feeling what I practise. The most informative tool about my health is 1)my feeling of wellbeing or not 2) my simple garmin watch for my heart-rate, sleep behaviour and my reactions to my outdoor sports, 3) my scale to watch my weight. The second most used tools are the books of physicians like Greger, Fuhrman, Barnard who are all dedicated to health, fitness and nutrition.
There's a concept in economics called 'existence value' that one can derive utility from knowing say that the Dwarf Lemur* population is no longer extinct but now rediscovered in Madagascar.
*No relation to our Lemur.
That is actually good to know. Unfortunately, people may derive existence value from the fossa but I digress.
Wow! I noticed something interesting while reading this book. I've really enjoyed the book and it has changed how I will approach using the medical system, so thanks for the recommendation @jacob!
This process of Overdiagnosis has the same dynamics as a few things.
Why is alert threshold tuning is so important for software engineer on callers?
The main costs of poorly tuned alerts that are noisy (ie have a lot of false positives) are on caller toil, burn out, and desensitization leading to important incidents being ignored.
I think the pressure on doctors to not get sued makes the results of the same problem of false positives different. This means extra interventions rather than ignored incidents.
In software, if you delay investigation of a major incident because of noisy alerts, you often won't be punished (ymmv, but blameless postmortem cultures would lay the blame at the process which has noisy alerting), so the risk is more of underintervention over time than overintervention if the alerts are noisy.
Why people who do indexing only check their assets once or twice a year?
The market movements in between the times they check rarely "matter" in the big picture and only cause extra anxiety and potential damaging interventions. This is directly analogous to how screening notices movements in health metrics that may be transient and not "matter".
Before all of the experiments looking for disease reservoirs were done, I suppose it was hard to imagine that there was a lot of movement that didn't matter in things like cancer. We now know otherwise.
I also wonder if there are places where harm is incorrectly modeled as cumulative rather than as a cycle of get sick and recover which results in more interventions than necessary or an intervention when a lifestyle change would do. One case that comes to mind is that I think that many people see cavities as cumulative (ie you can't heal a cavity once it forms, you must see the dentist), but really if you stop doing the things that cause cavities (ie eating sugar), then there is evidence that they seal up on their own. On the other hand, another pressure there is sometimes the intervention that would allow healing is not practical for most people. Maybe that's where the dentist comes in. (Or the medicine or whatever.)
One case that comes to mind is that I think that many people see cavities as cumulative (ie you can't heal a cavity once it forms, you must see the dentist), but really if you stop doing the things that cause cavities (ie eating sugar), then there is evidence that they seal up on their own.
In my experience they do indeed, whether I continue to eat sugar or not. I wish I had learned that earlier in life.
