Trade-off between medicalisation and early diagnosis of the lucky few

Mathew’s eloquent piece and its rapid responses prompt me to point out that there are trade-offs in risk and medicalisation.1 It helps to make them explicit.Every health awareness campaign, or lower referral threshold, or “Speak to your GP” comes at a price that is not only measured in money and time. Ulrich Beck, in his work Risk Society,2 suggests that modern society is increasingly occupied with debating, preventing, and managing risks. We have moved on from immediate, concrete threats of crop failure and starvation to risks that are more remote. Everywhere we look—charity campaigns, medical guidelines, social media, even the label on a bottle of Calpol—we see prompts to consider risk at probabilities of pathology that would not have been considered risky by previous generations.Adding to this, the distribution of risk in society is not uniform: as the great Geoffrey Rose pointed out, most disease comes from low risk individuals.3…
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