Professor of Medicine and Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School; Co-Director of the White River Junction Outcomes Group

Research Interests:
Dr. Welch is a general internist whose research focuses on the problems created by medicine's efforts to detect disease early: physicians test too often, treat too aggressively and tell too many people that they are sick. Most of his work has focused on overdiagnosis in cancer screening: in particular, screening for melanoma, cervical, breast and prostate cancer. His recent book, "Should I be tested for cancer? Maybe not and here's why" (UC Press 2004) was written while he was a Visiting Scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer - the cancer section of the World Health Organization in Lyon, France.

Selected Publications:

Welch HG, Woloshin S, Schwartz LM. How Two Studies on Cancer Screening Led to Two Results. The New York Times, Tuesday, March 13, 2007; Page D5, D8.

Welch HG, Schwartz LM, Woloshin S. What's Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses. The New York Times, Tuesday, January 2, 2007; Page D5.

Welch HG. Dangers in Early Detection. The Washington Post, Thursday, July 1, 2004; Page A23.

Journal Articles

1. Black WC, Welch HG. Advances in diagnostic imaging and overestimations of disease prevalence and the benefits of therapy. N Engl J Med 1993;328:1237-1243.


2. Welch HG, Schwartz LM, Woloshin S. Are increasing 5-year survival rates evidence of success against cancer? JAMA 2000 283:2975-78.


3. Welch HG, Schwartz LM, Woloshin S. Prostate-specific antigen levels in the United States: implications of various definitions for abnormal. J Natl Cancer Inst 2005;97:1132-7.


4. Welch HG, Woloshin S, Schwartz LM. Skin biopsy rates and incidence of melanoma: population based ecological study. BMJ 2005;331:481-4.


5. Davies L, Welch HG. The increasing incidence of thyroid cancer in the United States, 1973-2002. JAMA 2006;295;2164-7.