TEDx Talk: Alumna Jill Wruble on the Dangers of Treating Harmless Cancers

In 2013, Jill Wruble (D.O. ’87), a radiologist at the Veterans Medical Center and faculty member at Yale Medical School and University of Connecticut Medical School, became concerned with the explosion of incidentalomas—abnormalities that appear on medical tests ordered for a different purpose. These incidentalomas, she explained, can trigger additional medical testing, lead to unnecessary anxiety for the patient, and be very costly.

This past February, Wruble gave a TEDx Talk at West Point to increase awareness about how treating these potentially harmless cancers can be harmful to the patient, and to explain how little the public, health professionals, and policymakers understand this issue. (Wruble previously gave a TEDx talk in 2015 at the University of Pennsylvania on the related issue of incidentalomas.)

“Since the 1950s, many cancers have increased,” said Wruble. “[And] like some of these folks who are frozen among the crowds rushing through New York’s Grand Central, more and more of us also become frozen in our tracks by cancer.”

Watch the full video.