This is John Batchel, speaking to Dr. Ronald Dworkin, writing for Civitas Outlook at Civitas Institute,

about overdiagnosis and over-medicalization. Here the doctor describes over-diagnosis,

what is commonplace today and wasn't before. Many, many, many, many diagnoses. And one person. Here is Ronald to explain.

More of this tonight. Only on the margins. I mean, most physicians, at least anesthesiologists and surgeons,

they notice when their patients come in that the patients have on their problem, medical problem

list, maybe 15 to 20

diagnoses when, say, 30 years ago, we all would have noticed they had four or five diagnoses.

So we noticed that something's going on. And that observation is not nothing. I wrote a book

many years ago, artificial happiness, because I noticed that many patients were coming in on antidepressants.

This is back in the late 1990s.

And sure not, that was a phenomenon worth paying attention to.

In this case, it's the same thing.

I think many doctors haven't really thought about what the reason for the overdiagnosis is and why so many people are coming in

with these different diagnoses on their problem list but they they have observed the phenomena

and they do talk about it but probably just in the margins that they haven't really tried to explore

it i think