Healthcare’s vicious cycle: Over-diagnosis, over-treatment and over-spending (Best of MedCitizens)

Every week, MedCity News highlights the best of its MedCitizens: syndication partners and MedCity News readers who discuss life science current events on MedCity News.

Now here’s the best of what YOU had to say:

We need to stop the money drain of prescription without diagnosis. “Overdiagnosis means that people who have some condition that will never harm them get a disease label and, almost inevitably, treatment. Said treatment is at the very least costly, quite likely harmful, and the person must live with an unsettling and possibly even stigmatizing consciousness of being sick, or ‘at risk.’”

DSM-5 appendix: Field guide to Twitter personality types. “In an effort to assist the American Psychiatric Association withthe publication of the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) expected in May, 2013 it seemed only appropriate thata DSM-Tw (Twitter) supplement be provided to help classify newly emerging personality types on Twitter.”

Hospice-centric cancer care means less Neupogen and fewer robotic surgeries. “Any time you hear someone use the phrase ‘death panels,’ ask them if they are aware of a study of terminally ill lung cancer patients which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. It showed that those who chose palliative care and hospice lived three months longer and had a better quality of life, with fewer side effects, than those who opted for aggressive treatment.”

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