Thyroid cancer is particularly vulnerable to overdiagnosis. With the introduction of more high-powered imaging techniques, doctors were able to detect many more tiny lumps in people’s necks and surgically remove them, whether surgery was warranted or not. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of thyroid cancer surgeries performed on US, French, and Italian women in the first decade of the twenty-first century are now judged to have been unnecessary. In South Korea, where doctors were especially conscientious about thyroid screening, the number rose to 90 percent. (Men were also overdiagnosed, but in
...more
