The Journal of Community Health Management 2023;10(1):1–2 Content available at: https://www.ipinnovative.com/open-access-journals The Journal of Community Health Management Journal homepage: https://www.jchm.in/ Editorial Quaternary prevention: The antidote to medical overuse! Badrinarayan Mishra 1, *, Nidhi D Sinha 2 , Bidushi Mishra 3 1 Dept. of Community Medicine, R D Gardi Medical College, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India 2 Dept. of Dentistry, R D Gardi Medical College, Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India 3 People’s College of Dental Sciences, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 15-02-2023 Accepted 22-02-2023 Available online 28-04-2023 This is an Open Access (OA) journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. For reprints contact: reprint@ipinnovative.com On a conventional note, Man has managed diseases through preventive approaches before the availability of any specific treatment modality. In fact, at the onset, most of the disease entities are handled through this method as there is a dearth of empirical knowledge. But, in recent time the field of medical sciences have expanded and developed many armors, especially for established disease entities. This when coupled with digital dissemination of information, wider coverage of the populace by health insurance schemes, and dented ethical morale of healthcare providers has created a new challenge; the issue of medical overuse. In its’ simplest form medical overuse represents the issues of unwanted investigation and overtreatment that lack patient benefit and in multiple instances is even counterproductive. 1 Overdiagnosis, over-testing, overtreatment, diagnosis of abnormalities unrelated to disease, unnecessary medical evaluation, incorrect practice, or unwanted care are some of them. 2 Additionally, risk factors are increasingly being addressed as diseases, asymptomatic groups with low risk are frequently screened, and pre-disorders are frequently classified as manifest diseases. 3,4 A good illustration is threshold lowering by relocating the line dividing health and sickness is serum cholesterol levels. 5 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: badrinmishra@gmail.com (B. Mishra). Over time, there is a growing recognition of the fact that medical overuse includes unnecessary health care that provides no benefit to patients or puts them at risk of harm that outweighs any potential benefit. 6,7 More often than not, asymptomatic individuals are at risk of being labeled as patients. This brings in unnecessary anxiety and lowers the quality of life of those who are a victim of this malicious practice. 7 Furthermore, unnecessary medicine contributes to rising healthcare costs and a misallocation of scarce resources. 8,9 This increasingly visible situation has emerged as a significant healthcare issue, which is well substantiated by Barbara Stanfield’s report in 2000, which has put iatrogenic events as the third leading cause of death in the United States. 10 Furthermore, in 2003, The World Organization of National Colleges, Academies, and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians (WONCA) and the World International Classification Committee (WICC) recognized medical overuse as a cause of concern and advocated Quaternary Prevention(P4) as the modality to handle this issue. 11 Taking cognition of this and a growing number of studies and healthcare campaigns across the globe, different associations and agencies have risen up to the occasion. One such is the American Board of Internal Medicine, whose "Choosing Wisely" program (2015), is a distinct example of handling medical overuse by adopting the Quaternary https://doi.org/10.18231/j.jchm.2023.001 2394-272X/© 2023 Innovative Publication, All rights reserved. 1