Medicine & Ethics

How Overmedicalization Is Harming the Patients Medicine Swore to Help

By Lesandu Wickramasinghe, YouthCare Connect

Originally, medicine was dedicated to just one objective: to help people heal. Nowadays, healthcare professionals give patients more treatment than they actually need—which is described by the term overmedicalization. Overmedicalization is when elements of normal human life, such as feeling sad, being restless, or getting older, are considered medical conditions that have to be diagnosed and treated with medicine. It could be a doctor’s appointment, which, instead of just checking the patient’s state, results in the prescription of five different drugs. It could also be the labeling of a child with a disorder only because the child is unable to stay seated in the classroom. The real question medicine needs to ask is not just whether it can step in, but whether it should.

A Problem That Has a Long History

Overmedicalization is a problem that started in the mid-1900s when new drugs were brought in, and doctors found new ways in which they could practically treat diseases. These developments saved a lot of lives. But over time, medicine began to extend itself beyond its limits. Sociologist Peter Conrad, in his 2007 book The Medicalization of Society, demonstrated that aspects that have been at one time considered as normal human conditions, like grief, shyness, or high energy in children, were transformed into medical disorders (Conrad, 4).

What was meant to be a set of helpful tools slowly became a way of seeing almost every human difference as something that needed to be fixed.

When the Diagnosis Ends Up Causing More Harm Than Good

This isn’t just a hypothesis; the harm is actually there, and it is measurable. A study in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that some patients, who were diagnosed with early-stage thyroid cancer, had to do a surgery for tumors that wouldn’t have posed any threat to them. Unfortunately, some of them ended up with serious health issues such as thyroid malfunction and nerve damage, not due to cancer, but to the treatment they were given unnecessarily. The study concluded that the increase in thyroid cancer incidence was essentially the result of more frequent scanning, rather than a harmful disease. Similar in concept to overmedicalization, this is called overdiagnosis. Overdiagnosis is when a patient is informed that they have a condition that would never have made them ill, and they still experience harmful treatments. It has been reported in breast cancer, prostate cancer, and kidney disease.

The Role of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Overmedicalization does not happen on its own. Drug companies play a big part in it. Dr. Marcia Angell, who used to lead The New England Journal of Medicine, wrote that pharmaceutical companies have paid for research designed to widen the definition of diseases and lower the bar for who needs treatment—because more diagnoses mean more customers. For example, when the definition of high cholesterol is changed to include more people, millions of healthy individuals suddenly need medication. When mild worry becomes an official disorder, the number of people eligible for medication increases quickly. This does not mean those medications are bad. Many people truly need and benefit from them.

The problem is when the line between people who are sick and people who are simply human gets blurred on purpose.

Moving Forward

Fighting overmedicalization does not mean turning away from modern medicine. It means bringing back the idea of doing only what is truly needed. It means teaching doctors to ask not just what can we do but what we should do, and it means putting as much research into the problem of doing too much as we put into the problem of doing too little. And it means building a medical system where the patient’s full life, not just their test results, is always part of the picture. Medicine is most powerful not only when it acts, but when it knows when to pause.