The Art of Manliness Overdiagnosed — How Our Obsession with Medical Testing and Labels Is Making Us Sicker
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Sep 8, 2025 Susanna Sullivan, a neurologist and author of The Age of Diagnosis, dives into the downsides of overdiagnosis in modern medicine. She discusses how our obsession with medical testing can lead to increased anxiety and unnecessary treatments. The conversation covers the complexities of conditions like cancer, diabetes, and Lyme disease, stressing that not every medical label is helpful. Sullivan advocates for informed decision-making and a more personalized approach to healthcare, emphasizing the psychological toll of being unnecessarily diagnosed.
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System Incentives Shape Testing Culture
- Health systems and financial incentives shape how readily tests are offered and performed.
- Universal systems like the NHS can unintentionally protect against unnecessary testing driven by fee-for-service dynamics.
Moving Cutoffs Create More Patients
- Shifting diagnostic cutoffs (e.g., prediabetes) expands patient labels without clear health benefits.
- Creating pre-disease categories can turn healthy people into patients and fail to reduce disease rates.
Personal Prediabetes Scare
- Brett describes his own brief prediabetes alarm after a fasting glucose of 102 and obsessively self-monitoring.
- A doctor's contextual interpretation reassured him that his overall risk was low.
