12/27/2025
Andrew Kaufman MD
Early diagnosis is not synonymous with better outcomes.
In many cases, it initiates a cascade of medical interventions — medications, procedures, and ongoing surveillance — that may do little to enhance long-term health and, in many instances, may cause measurable harm.
This is known as the diagnosis-treatment cascade: one finding leads to another, often in the absence of symptoms or significant risk. Overdiagnosis can result in unnecessary stress, overtreatment, and exposure to iatrogenic harm — that is, illness caused by medical intervention itself.
You start one medication to manage the diagnosis.
Soon after, you're prescribed another to manage the side effects of the first — and often a third to counteract the second.
Conventional medicine tends to treat lab values, biomarkers, and theoretical risks — not the whole person.
Too often, decisions are made based on numerical thresholds rather than the lived experience of the individual. A test result might place you in a diagnostic category, triggering a cascade of interventions, despite the absence of symptoms or real functional impairment.
And here’s what’s rarely discussed: many diagnostic tests are poorly regulated and lack strong evidence of accuracy, consistency, or clinical relevance. From hormone panels to imaging scans, the rate of false positives, misdiagnoses, and overdiagnosis is far higher than most patients realize.
What if, instead of relying solely on routine screenings, you practiced attuned, daily observation of how you feel?
What if your baseline wasn’t a clinical average, but your own sense of vitality, clarity, and resilience?
True health isn’t built through passive monitoring. It’s built through active engagement, conscious choices, and radical self-responsibility.
And in a system where early detection often becomes early intervention — whether you need it or not — sometimes the most intelligent choice is to step back, listen in, and take ownership of your body’s story.
