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Preventive medicine makes us miserable

The old adage—prevention is better than cure—is one we have heard so often that it's hard to shift from our minds. It is intuitively powerful. It just seems to make sense. But shift it we must, for it fuels what Iona Heath, in her cogent article this week (p 954), calls “the excessive self confidence of preventive medicine,” which is making us ill and miserable.

Paradoxically, says Heath, the more people are exposed to doctors and contemporary health care, including the rhetoric of preventive care, the sicker they seem to feel. Meanwhile the …