Low value care often brings unintended consequences for breastfeeding women, their babies, and health systems
"In cases of overdiagnosis, management cannot improve health but exposes patients to risk of harm, including overtreatment and anxiety." Davies & Salisbury 2025
"Medicalization, the framing of non-medical issues in medical terms, easily leads to overuse of tests and treatments with little benefit but significant harm and cost." Tikkenen et al 2025
How might overdiagnosis and overtreatment worsen outcomes for patients?
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Overdiagnosis can cause harm to patients by
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The side-effects of unnecessary treatment (antibiotics, frenotomy, antifungals, proton pump inhibitors, maternal or infant elimination diets)
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Diagnosis or labelling-related anxiety or depression
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Financial burden.
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Diagnoses can obscure the actual causes of distress.
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Pathologisation may be detrimental to recovery, due to the neurobiological power of expectation.
How might overdiagnosis and overtreatment impact negatively upon the health system?
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Invests limited health dollar in interventions which lack efficacy
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Failure to prevent or offer effective early intervention worsens downstream outcomes and their cost to the health system
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Research driven solutions (including complex, multidomain and behavioural interventions) remain unfunded because of focus on the ineffective interventions.
Selected references
Davies E, Salisbury H. How do we talk about overdiagnosis of mental health conditions without dismissing people's suffering? BMJ. 2025;389:r669.
Tikkinen KA, Halme ALE, guyatt GH, Gasziou P. The impact of definitions of disease on overdiagnosis. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2025:doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.1727.
