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Opinion: When Doctors Disagree: Understanding Different Medical Opinions
- January 29, 2026
- Elspeth Davies, Qualitative Researcher, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford HealthDay Reporter
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Why can’t doctors agree on what’s best for you? If you’ve ever received mixed advice from doctors or seen differing opinions expressed by professionals in the news, you’re not alone.
One specialist may strongly recommend a screening test, medication or treatment, while another urges caution or even advises against it. This can be confusing, frustrating and sometimes, worrying.
Patients often ask: Shouldn’t doctors be able to agree on what’s best for me?
The short answer is that medical disagreement is not necessarily a sign of incompetence or bad faith. Instead, it reflects deeper tensions in how medicine understands illness, risk and what it means to live well.
In some areas, these disagreements have become so intense that doctors and researchers now talk about “sides” and “camps,” rather than differences of opinion.
For the past five years, I have studied how disagreement – sometimes fierce – arises in the field of cancer screening. Professionals do not agree on the value of technologies that may change how people get diagnosed with cancer.
I draw on this fieldwork in this article to describe more generally how and why differences of opinions arise in medicine, and what this means for you as a patient.
It’s not just about the evidence
It’s easy to assume that when doctors disagree, one must be ignoring the science. But in many cases, they are looking at the same evidence and drawing different conclusions.
That’s because medical evidence often comes from studies of large groups of people. These studies can tell us what usually happens, but they cannot perfectly predict what will happen to any one person. Even with modern tools that estimate individual risk, there is always uncertainty.
Doctors must interpret this uncertainty. Some place more weight on the chance of preventing future illness. Others focus more on avoiding unnecessary tests, treatments and side effects. These different approaches are shaped not only by science, but also by values.
Different ideas of harm and benefit
A good example is cancer screening – the focus of my work. Screening tests can find disease early, sometimes before symptoms appear. This can save lives. But screening can also find changes in the body that would never go on to cause harm.
When this happens, people may undergo treatments they never needed. This is known as overdiagnosis.
In breast cancer screening, for instance, research in the United Kingdom has shown that for every life saved through screening, several women are diagnosed with cancers that would not have affected them. Some doctors see this as an acceptable trade-off.
Others worry deeply about the physical and emotional harm caused by unnecessary treatment.
When doctors disagree about screening, they are often weighing harm and benefit differently – not ignoring the evidence.
What counts as illness?
Another reason for disagreement is that illness is not always clear-cut. In mental health, doctors may differ on when sadness becomes depression. In screening, they may disagree on whether an early change in cells should be called a disease at all.
These questions don’t have simple answers. They depend on how we define illness, how we think about risk and how much medical intervention we believe is helpful — or harmful — in everyday life.
Conflict can arise
These are big questions to grapple with, and we – doctors and patients alike – don’t always do a good job of recognizing their complexity. Instead, these debates can become tense and emotional.
Instead of open conversation, we sometimes split into opposing camps, with little willingness to listen to those who disagree. This polarization can get in the way of good decision-making.
Medical debates are often presented as black and white: for screening or against it, pro-treatment or anti-treatment. But most doctors don’t actually think this way.
Their views often sit somewhere in between and change depending on the situation. One doctor may support early detection in one type of cancer but be cautious in another.
Another may recommend a certain vaccination strongly while still acknowledging uncertainties. When debates are framed as all-or-nothing conflicts, these important nuances get lost.
What would help doctors disagree better?
Better disagreement doesn’t mean less disagreement — it means more thoughtful conversation. This may involve using less polarized language. In my field, terms like “early detection” and “overdiagnosis” can sound simple but hide complex realities.
Talking instead about finding the right diagnosis at the right time may help doctors focus on shared goals rather than opposing positions.
Listening also matters. When doctors take time to understand why colleagues hold different views — and when they explain these differences clearly to patients — it becomes easier to make decisions together.
About the expert
A medical anthropologist by background, my research seeks to understand some of the social and ethical issues surrounding new and existing cancer screening programs. Drawing on anthropological methods, I aim to centre the stories of people affected by cancer prevention and early detection interventions, considering how a range of ways of engaging with such programs can come to constitute living well. I am particularly interested in issues surrounding overdiagnosis and medicalization, injustices and inequalities, and in exploring the role of ethnography and other forms of qualitative research in evidence-based medicine and policy-making.
