What is normal and what is disease?

Future generations of doctors will face different challenges than I did. When I started training, disease was easier to spot than it is now.

Today, the line between sickness and wellness has blurred–and it gets blurrier all the time. The quantified self movement stands to make this worse.

In a profit-driven healthcare climate, disease feeds the business model. One way to drive sales of drugs and procedures is to create more diseases. And to do that, one has only to medicalize the human condition.

Why doctors (and patients) discount the resilience of the human body perplexes me.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Allen Frances at a Lown Institute meeting this year. He is an emeritus professor in Psychiatry at Duke and an outspoken voice against overdiagnosis and overtreatment in mental health.

It’s less than two minutes, and it’s a metaphor for what ails much of our broken healthcare system.

Remember…When we overdiagnosis and overtreat, we have less attention and resources to treat those with real illness.

JMM