First10EM - By Justin Morgenstern - April 4, 2022
The paper: Vigna M, Vigna C, Lang ES. Overdiagnosis in the emergency department: a sharper focus. Intern Emerg Med. 2022 Mar 5. doi: 10.1007/s11739-022-02952-8. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35249191
…“ The essential basic concept is that sometimes (perhaps often) making a diagnosis can actually cause a patient harm. This might occur with incidental findings, when normal human variation is transformed into disease. It might occur with self resolving illnesses, such that a condition that would have disappeared on its own is medicalized, resulting in side effects from treatment but no chance of benefit. It might occur with very slowly progressive pathology which would have never caused the patient harm, but is now pursued with unnecessary interventions. False positives are technically a different concept, in that they represent an error with no true underlying pathology, but the result is the same: a patient receives an unnecessary or inappropriate label that ends up resulting in harm...“