Among the perplexing phenomena of our times is the fact that the more the funding of the National Health Service has grown (sixfold in fifty years), the gloomier the statistics around ill health have become. More doctors and nurses, more sophisticated methods of investigation and more effective treatments should result in better ‘health outcomes’. And in many ways they do. Even so, the number of people labelled as having a long-term health condition – whether physical or mental – has leapt by six million since 2010.  

‘We are becoming victims of too much medicine,’ argues Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan in her wide-ranging investigation of the protean forms of (over)medicalisation. Redefine what was previously considered ‘normal’ as ‘abnormal’ by lowering the threshold of what constitutes, for example, raised blood pressure or cholesterol and prescriptions for their treatment will rocket by a staggering seven and twenty times respectively. Seek out with screening programmes the early stages of disease and about a third of those found to have, for instance, breast or prostate cancer will be subjected to the traumas of surgery and chemotherapy for no good purpose.  

O’Sullivan impressively marshals evidence of how these and other drivers of ‘overmedicalisation’ have arisen, the minimal benefits conferred and the harms that can result. Most striking is her examination of the explosion in diagnoses of mental health conditions, such as autism and ADHD (the number of adults seeking