Dr. H. Gilbert Welch: PSA Tests, Breast Exams and Other 'Early Detection' Tests
Updated November 4, 2015
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, MD, was a recent guest speaker at the McDougall Advanced Study Weekend in Santa Rosa, CA.
“A strategy of looking for small early lesions can create as many problems as it solves”, says Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, MD, general internist at the White River Junction VA and a professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Research. For the past 25 years he has been practicing medicine, Dr. Welch has been asking hard questions about his profession. His arguments are frequently counter-intuitive, even heretical, yet have regularly appeared in the country’s most prestigious medical journals — Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute — as well as in op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. For the past two decades, Dr. Welch’s research has focused on the problems created by medicine’s efforts to detect disease early: physicians test too often, treat too overdiagnosis in cancer screening: in particular, screening for melanoma, thyroid, lung, breast and prostate cancer. He is the author of SHOULD I BE TESTED FOR CANCER? Maybe Not and Here’s Why (UC Press 2004), author of OVERDIAGNOSED: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health (Beacon Press 2011) and has just completed his newest book: LESS MEDICINE, MORE HEALTH: 7 Assumptions that Drive Too Much Medical Care (Beacon Press 2015).