Physician Focus

Physician Focus  is a monthly media and public information campaign that provides health information on a wide variety of subjects for patients of all ages throughout the Commonwealth. Print articles, bylined by member physicians, are distributed to daily, weekly, and monthly publications in the state.

Produced in partnership with Hopkinton Community Access and Media  (HCAM-TV), the Physician Focus  television program reaches some 275 communities and nearly two million households in Massachusetts each month through public access stations. Adding national public access broadcasts, the program's total reach is approximately 2.5 million households.  

Visit the HCAM-TV website  to view past Physician Focus  programs in their entirety.

Physician Focus: Too Much Medicine

Physicians and patients have long believed that more care leads to better health. Annual check-ups and recommended regular screenings would serve to catch problems early, preventing diseases from progressing. What could be bad about that?

Increasingly, however, more physicians are wary about the problems caused by ‘too much medicine.”

“We’ve all been taught that sooner is always better,” says H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., “particularly for a disease like cancer, [but] the basic problem is that whenever we look for early forms of disease, we find a lot more than we expect. And that means that some of what we’re finding is never going to be relevant to the patient.”

Dr. Welch, a general internist and Professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, shares his experience and research on the topic of ‘too much medicine’ in the January edition of Physician Focus with the Massachusetts Medical Society. Hosting this edition is Dale Magee, M.D., a past president of the Society and Professor Emeritus of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UMass Medical School.

Read more or watch the video below.