Medicine, health care, and philosophy
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Med Health Care Philos · May 2010
Too much of a good thing is wonderful? A conceptual analysis of excessive examinations and diagnostic futility in diagnostic radiology.
It has been argued extensively that diagnostic services are a general good, but that it is offered in excess. So what is the problem? Is not "too much of a good thing wonderful", to paraphrase Mae West? This article explores such a possibility in the field of radiological services where it is argued that more than 40% of the examinations are excessive. The question of whether radiological examinations are excessive cries for a definition of diagnostic futility. ⋯ We have to settle with contextually framed value-related definitions. Such definitions will state how bad "too much of a good thing" is and make it possible to assess how much of the bad thing there is. Hence we have to know how bad it is before we can tell how much of it there is in the world.