Thank you for responding to our article1 with your letter identifying vested economic interest as an important additional “driver” of overtesting, overdiagnosing, and overtreatment. There has been good documentation of this by a number of scholars2,3 and we agree such interests are an important factor in the medicalization of healthy people. A policy approach that might begin to address this problem would be a complete ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals in both Canada and the United States. There is little evidence that such advertising improves health outcomes, and good evidence that it drives up medical activity—whether it is testing, (over) diagnosing, or prescribing.4,5
Footnotes
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Competing interests: None declared
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