The court of public opinion ruled loudly against new breast and cervical cancer screening recommendations in late November. Of course, what’s at stake isn’t lives, costs or standards, but the status quo.

To whit: “patients – and organizations of doctors and disease specialists – find themselves unable to accept the counterintuitive notion that more testing can be bad for your health.”

Indeed. We might better resolve the battles over when to do something (or nothing) in a health care context once we acknowledge the status quo and recognize how it anchors our capacity to make or accept any proposed change.