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Abstract Preventive health care has become prominent in clinical medicine in the US, emphasising risk assessment and control, rather than addressing the signs and symptoms of pathology. Current clinical guidelines, reinforced by evidence-based decision aids and quality of care assessment, encourage clinicians to focus on maintaining rigid test thresholds that are based on population norms. While achieving these goals may benefit the total population, this may be of no benefit or even harmful to individual patients. In order to explore how this phenomenon is manifested in clinical care and consider some factors that promote and sustain this trend, we analysed observations of over 100 clinical consultations, and open-ended interviews with 58 primary care clinicians and 70 of their patients. Both clinicians and patients equated at-risk states with illness and viewed the associated interventions not as prevention, but as treatment. This conflation of risk and disease redefines clinical success such that reducing the threat of anticipated future illness requires the acceptance of aggressive treatments and any associated adverse effects in the present. While the expanding emphasis on preventive medicine may improve the health profile of the total population, the implications of these innovations for the wellbeing of individual patients merits careful reconsideration.
