LONDONDERRY, Vt. – You are invited to a light luncheon at Neighborhood Connections, 5700 Mountain Marketplace, Londonderry, Vt., where the guest speaker is Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, on Friday, Aug. 15, from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
His talk is titled “Will More Screening Tests Really Make you more Healthy?” Welch believes medicine has overinvested in screening – particularly cancer screening – to the detriment of human health. He will explore why screening doesn’t work that well, and has so little effect, if any, on your longevity. Yet it does produce real harms: false alarms, cycles of more testing, and overdiagnosis, finding and treating abnormalities that were never going to bother you. Much of his work has focused on overdiagnosis in cancer screening, in particular screening for melanoma, thyroid, lung, breast, and prostate cancer.
Welch is a general internist who has worked for the U.S. Indian Health Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Dartmouth Medical School. For more than three decades, he has been asking hard questions about his profession. His arguments are frequently counterintuitive, even heretical, yet have regularly appeared in the country’s most prestigious medical journals – Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute – as well as in op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. His most recent book is “Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions that Drive Too Much Medical Care.”
Please call 802 824-4343 to reserve a seat.