Slow medicine @ Radio 4

Radio 4 today looked at how we've got 'too much medicine' - and that we need to slow down a bit:

BBC Radio 4

Too Much Medicine? The Problem of Overtreatment

Too Much Medicine? The Problem of Overtreatment

Dr Margaret McCartney investigates the controversy of medicine's search for traces of disease in people who would otherwise never know about them, or suffer any ill effects.

There's growing world-wide concern about the extent to which screening programmes and advanced diagnostic tools are finding signs of serious diseases, particularly cancer, in people who are outwardly healthy. For example, in South Korea, a mass screening programme for thyroid cancer has detected 15 times more cases than before it started - yet there's been no improvement in death rates from the disease.

The fundamental problem is that the harder doctors look for disease in people who are apparently well, the more they will find. Yet most of it will never matter to those people.

As a result, there is a movement towards Slow Medicine - echoing Italy's Slow Food campaign - that puts more emphasis on shared decision-making between doctor and patient, not always prescribing every possible test and treatment, and keeping people "in the kingdom of the well" as long as possible, rather than moving them prematurely into "the kingdom of the sick".

BBC Radio 4 - Too Much Medicine? The Problem of Overtreatment

The answer, then, seems to be in 'slow medicine' - which is very much part of the 'slow movement':
Futures Forum: The Slow Movement
Futures Forum: Slow Food: "Pleasure, hedonism, enjoyment, tranquility, conviviality, richness"

And it too started in Italy:
Slow Medicine - HOME 

And it's catching on:

Slow medicine is a movement calling for change in medical practice which took inspiration from the wider slow food movement. Practitioners of slow medicine have published several different definitions, but the common emphasis is on the word "slow," meaning to allow the medical practitioner to have sufficient time with the patient. Like for the slow food movement, slow medicine is a call to balance over-emphasis on fast processes which reduce quality.^[1]

Slow medicine - Wikipedia

Slow Medicine is to health care what Slow Food is to fast food — a movement to balance the existing over-emphasis on fast processes that reduce quality. Part of this work is through public education to help people make better choices.  Below are some links and information connected with this new way of approaching “health care reform.”  Many variations of the idea have appeared over the years.

The first published article on “slow medicine,” by Dr. Alberto Dolara, was in an Italian cardiology journal, in 2002.  The abstract is linked here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11899567

Carl Honore touched on slow medicine as an alternative medicine concept in his book, In Praise of Slowness, published in 2005.

Dennis McCullough MD introduced slow medicine as a geriatric medicine concept in his book, My Mother, Your Mother, published in 2008.  He has since been making appearances via talks and video, on its applicability to geriatrics and gerontology.  In 2010, J. Ladd Bauer MD cohosted the radio program Slow Medicine with Dr. McCullough calling in, on KWMR FM radio.

The lead editorial “Slow Medicine” in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, author J. Ladd Bauer MD, published in 2008 (the first Medline article in English about this subject) presents a very broad outline for the concept's development:
SlowMedicine ...


Slow Medicine - Slow Medicine History
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