Internationally esteemed British GP, Dr Iona Heath will deliver a free public lecture at the Gold Coast Hospital on Thursday, May 26, about the growing problem of ‘too much medicine’.
Dr Iona Heath is a former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a long-time contributor to one of the world’s leading journals, the British Medical Journal.
As a working GP in London, Dr Heath has tried to help her patients avoid the harms of unnecessary tests and treatments, and as a powerful speaker she’s informing audiences around the world about the dangers of having ‘too much of a good thing’.
The free public lecture is being hosted by the Gold Coast Health Service and Bond University’s Centre for Research in Evidence-Based Practice (CREBP), which was recently awarded more than $9 million in NHMRC public research funding to examine the problem of too many tests and treatments.
Dr Rae Thomas, Senior Research Fellow at Bond University’s CREBP said: “As practitioners we are trained to know the answers, ‘fix’ the problems, and be confident in our approaches. It seems counter-intuitive that we could do too much, but we do it all the time. Sometimes we label people with problems before it is necessary or jump into intensive treatment when smaller steps are warranted.”
CREBP’s Dr Ray Moynihan added: “Along with medicine’s celebrated ability to heal the sick, there is growing global unease about its capacity to harm the healthy. Along with saving lives, screening programmes are also diagnosing diseases that will never cause harm. Overuse of pharmaceuticals, particularly among our elders, can threaten health rather than enhance it.”
The free public lecture is a rare opportunity to hear celebrated British GP, Dr Iona Heath, who is at the cutting edge of a new global movement within medicine to wind back the harms of too much medicine.
The lecture will be held in E-Block, Ground Level, Lecture Theatre 1, Gold Coast Hospital.