We all believe and accept that preventive medicine improves people's quality of life, but we do not usually question whether its application can cause harm. The doctor takes his patients' blood pressure, weighs them, and asks for blood and cholesterol tests; The women undergo a cytology, a mammogram and a bone densitometry. He wants to take care of them; seeks to detect risks and prevent harm to help its patients. In this process of searching for risk, diseases are detected, and thus "the new patients" appear, people who feel healthy but for whom the doctor has found a health problem.

Does all this make sense? Do all the people the doctor wants to care for benefit from early detection of diseases? Can one call these findings diseases? These are the questions that the author asks himself, a family doctor who is convinced of the importance of preventive medicine and has dedicated time to reflect with his colleagues and patients about the impact of being classified as sick.