ArticleMedicine, health care, and philosophy2017
Defining disease in the context of overdiagnosis.
Article in Medicine, health care, and philosophy, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ontological deskilling: clinical expertise and the changing disease object in precision medicine.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- Conceptual scaffolding for the philosophy of medicine.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2025Article
- Electrochemistry in a Two- or Three-Electrode Configuration to Understand Monopolar or Bipolar Configurations of Platinum Bionic Implants.Micromachines · 2023Article
- Race, class, caste, disability, sterilisation and hysterectomy.Medical humanities · 2023Article
- Investigating the feasibility and ethical implications of phenotypic screening using stem cell-derived tissue models to detect and manage disease.Stem cell reports · 2022Review
- Health and disease as practical concepts: exploring function in context-specific definitions.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2022Review
- Ethical Issues of Digital Twins for Personalized Health Care Service: Preliminary Mapping Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- How to Draw the Line Between Health and Disease? Start with Suffering.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2021Article
- Overdiagnosis: one concept, three perspectives, and a model.European journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Reducing overdiagnosis in primary care is needed.The European journal of general practice · 2017Article
- The overdiagnosis of what? On the relationship between the concepts of overdiagnosis, disease, and diagnosis.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2017Article
- Mistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine Comment on "Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine".International journal of health policy and management · 2017Article
- Overdiagnostic uncertainty.European journal of epidemiology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of 'overdiagnosis', the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises questions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue that 'disease' should be considered a vague concept with a non-classical structure. On this view, overdiagnosed cases are 'borderline' cases of disease, falling in the zone between cases that are clearly disease, and cases that are clearly not disease. We then develop a précising definition of disease designed to provide practical help in preventing and limiting overdiagnosis. We argue that for this purpose, we can define disease as dysfunction that has a significant risk of causing severe harm to the patient.
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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.