Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease

by Alan Cassels, H. Gilbert Welch (Foreword)

Why wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right? Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you're facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong?

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Health

176 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2012

Reviews

[Karla · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read about medical screening - how the providers overstate the benefits, understate the risks and make a lot of money doing so.

[Aydin · Rating 2 out of 5]

wouldn’t call this one a page turner

[BethK · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a MUST for anyone who ever seeks medical care or anyone who ever faces a chance for a screen, or sees an Awareness Raising campaign. Can this test help me? Can it detract from my actual conditions by falsely indicating I may have a condition? Am I willing to follow on and do the next steps after I "know" - whether those are further tests, taking a medication for the rest of my life to prevent it (with side effects), accepting the "fact" of my early demise, or the decision about whether or not to have children? Once you "find out", you cannot "unknow" this result - and it could be wrong.

[nadja felton · Rating 5 out of 5]

some much needed common sense

The US is spending more than any other nation in the world on healthcare, and doesn’t have much to show for it in terms of health outcomes. This book shows where much of the money is going, and how ineffective and misleading the game of early detection is. Highly recommended!

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book. The author explores how screening healthy people for diseases as opposed to using screening as a diagnostic tool when there are symptoms present, can actually make you sicker. He contends that there are many false positive results and the resulting anxiety and subsequent tests a person undergoes if they don't take a wait and see attitude can be quite detrimental to people.
He also points out that screening tests that have been used for decades may not need to be used as often as we are told, however, since that doesn't go with what we believe based on what we've been told, and because special interest groups and agencies cry foul, we continue in the way that wehave always known.
There is so much in this book and I found it so interesting that it is hard to summarize it all. I would recommend this book even if you aren't interested in this type of thing. One day the question the author asks, and what we may have to ask, is 'what happens if I do nothing?'

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a quick, easy, accessible read with clear writing, thanks in part to the way it was organized with each major diagnostic test getting its own chapter. It had more of an essay/thesis feel than a book feel, to me. I also found it a bit topographical in that it covered a lot but didn't go into a huge amount of detail on each topic. Medical screening is one of those things that most people don't think twice about. The main message, instead of being "Medical screening is a useless waste of time," is more about the approach you should take toward it: "Think critically, don't assume and ask questions". I liked that, because it made the book come across as more balanced.

[Argum · Rating 4 out of 5]

While overall well presented information about screening guidelines and role it should play, the agenda is a bit heavy handed. THis is especially in play in the colon cancer chapter where a non standard unusual Virtual Colonoscopy is used in placed of the more usual screening tests. It reeks of agenda while never actually crossing the line because it is acknowledged as unusual. The author though is fear mongering as much as the drug companies he slams for inventing diseases in other chapters.

[Science For The People]

Featured on Skeptically Speaking show #173 on July 15, 2012, during an interview with author Alan Cassels. http://skepticallyspeaking.ca/episode...