Overdiagnosis

In the late days of the last century we began to believe that we should be able to live lives free of pain and suffering. A pill, an operation, a doctor would make us better. By diagnosing thar we were susceptible to, for example, a certain cancer, medicine could prevent us from getting that type of cancer. It mattered not what the odds were nor at what age we might actually get cancer. We needed to be treated now. Relatively recently there appears to be a movement in medicine to accept the fact that, at times, we do live in a vale of tears. One such indication is an article by David Dobbs in Scientific American.

Dobbs argues that we are attributing to PTSD the 'normal' problems of depression and anxiety that many veterans experience. He makes it easy to understand his argument by starting the article with this list of "Key Concepts"

• The syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is under fire because its defining criteria are too broad, leading to rampant overdiagnosis.
• The flawed PTSD concept may mistake soldiers' natural process of adjustment to civilian life for dysfunction.
• Misdiagnosed soldiers receive the wrong treatments and risk becoming mired in a Veterans Administration system that encourages chronic disability.