This article analyses research exploring medication adherence, help-seeking behaviour, screening and behaviour change to argue that all interventions have the potential for both benefit and harm. Accordingly, health psychology may have inadvertently contributed to psychological harms (e.g. lead times, anxiety, risk compensation and rebound effects); medical harms (e.g. medication side effects, unnecessary procedures) and social harms (e.g. financial costs, increased consultations rates). Such harms may result from medicalisation or pharmaceuticalisation. Or, they may reflect the ways in which we manage probabilities and an optimistic bias that emphasises benefit over cost.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 20. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 November 2025.
All research outputs
#2,372,256
of 34,302,672 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Health Psychology
#292
of 2,449 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#29,665
of 344,584 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Health Psychology
#26
of 240 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,302,672 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 93rd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,449 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.7. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 344,584 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 91% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 240 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
