Overdiagnosed

After the criteria used to define osteoporosis were altered, seven million American women were turned into patients-literally overnight. The proliferation of fetal monitoring in the 1970s was associated with a 66 percent increase in the number of women told they needed emergency C-sections, but it did not affect how often babies needed intensive care-or the frequency of infant death. The introduction of prostate cancer screening resulted in over a million additional American men being told they have prostate cancer, and while studies disagree on the question of whether a few have been…