ArticleSociology of health & illness2014
The pursuit of preventive care for chronic illness: turning healthy people into chronic patients.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- "Am I in 'Suboptimal Health'?": The Narratives and Rhetoric in Carving out the Grey Area Between Health and Illness in Everyday Life.Sociology of health & illness · 2025Article
- Is Prediabetes Overdiagnosed? Yes: A Patient-Epidemiologist's Experience.Annals of family medicine · 2024Article
- Unsettling the treatment imperative? Chemotherapy decision-making in the wake of genomic techniques.Sociology of health & illness · 2023Article
- The Dangers of Being Old in Rural Tanzania: A Call for Interventions for Strengthening Palliative Care in Low-Income Communities.Frontiers in aging · 2022Article
- Are Corporations Re-Defining Illness and Health? The Diabetes Epidemic, Goal Numbers, and Blockbuster Drugs.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2021Review
- Article
- Patients-in-waiting or chronically healthy individuals? People with elevated cholesterol talk about risk.Sociology of health & illness · 2019Article
- Racialized Risk in Clinical Care: Clinician Vigilance and Patient Responsibility.Medical anthropology · 2019Article
- Deprescribing medications for older adults in the primary care context: A mixed studies review.Health science reports · 2018Article
- Identity, community and care in online accounts of hereditary colorectal cancer syndrome.New genetics and society · 2018Article
- Electronic Health Records and the Disappearing Patient.Medical anthropology quarterly · 2017Article
- Diagnosis, narrative identity, and asymptomatic disease.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Preventive health care has become prominent in clinical medicine in the US, emphasising risk assessment and control, rather than addressing the signs and symptoms of pathology. Current clinical guidelines, reinforced by evidence-based decision aids and quality of care assessment, encourage clinicians to focus on maintaining rigid test thresholds that are based on population norms. While achieving these goals may benefit the total population, this may be of no benefit or even harmful to individual patients. In order to explore how this phenomenon is manifested in clinical care and consider some factors that promote and sustain this trend, we analysed observations of over 100 clinical consultations, and open-ended interviews with 58 primary care clinicians and 70 of their patients. Both clinicians and patients equated at-risk states with illness and viewed the associated interventions not as prevention, but as treatment. This conflation of risk and disease redefines clinical success such that reducing the threat of anticipated future illness requires the acceptance of aggressive treatments and any associated adverse effects in the present. While the expanding emphasis on preventive medicine may improve the health profile of the total population, the implications of these innovations for the wellbeing of individual patients merits careful reconsideration.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.