December 10, 2014 | Clinical Informatics News has recently highlighted opinion pieces that raise concerns about overdiagnosis of benign or early-stage cancers and the growing use of surrogate endpoints to evaluate new drugs. At aeon, Jeff Wheelwright takes a more sweeping view, arguing that better science understanding the risk factors for serious diseases has, in many cases, led to worse medicine that focuses too single-mindedly on biomarkers and risk signs, while losing perspective on quality-of-life issues that arise around frequent screening and early interventions. Wheelwright's piece examines the basic assumptions of a system that prescribes daily drugs to thousands of people in order to protect a small percentage of them from heart attack or stroke, and asks both patients and physicians to think more deeply about how much risk is acceptable. Aeon