Recently, I was mulling over the public reaction to comments about ‘low-value care’ in medicine when I came across Professor Stephen Leeder’s eloquent article ‘‘Low-value care’: Why do some doctors persist despite the evidence?’

Professor Leeder had made pertinent comments about the various motivations for holding on to practices that are not supported by strong evidence.

These range from the need to adapt care to individual patients and the conflict between a guideline and a clinician’s individual experience, to the inherent conservatism of clinical practice.

The aspect that surprised me in the reactions I saw from many in the medical community, however, concerned a misunderstanding of what the term ‘low-value care’ refers to.

In a time when GPs are feeling particularly undervalued, some GPs were concerned that the term was being applied to their specialty generally.

I saw others who were concerned that care at the end of life would be judged to be of ‘low value’ given the obvious limitations of the ultimate outcomes.

It’s easy to become defensive when we feel under-valued, but the issue of low-value care is a real one in modern medicine, and it spans all of clinical practice.