Cancer screenings not all they're cracked up to be
Filed under: Health
A recent New York Times story is chilling enough to certainly turn the health care world upside down.
The message: Cancer screenings might not save lives. In a shocking and polarizing move, the American Cancer Society is backpedaling on cancer screenings, amending its previous stance that screenings are invaluable.
By definition, screenings are meant to detect potentially life-threatening tumors. But experts say there's no proof that's happening. Fighting words, some might say, to many cancer patients and survivors.
Record numbers of cancer cases caught early are attributed to mammograms and PSA tests. But experts argue despite that, the number of advanced cancers are not trending downward.
Jumping on the bandwagon, are The Journal of the American Medical Association authors who recently penned, "screening may be increasing the burden of low-risk cancers without significantly reducing the burden of more aggressively growing cancers and therefore not resulting in the anticipated reduction in cancer mortality."
Co-author of that statement, Laura Esserman of the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center said "The benefit (of cancer screening) is not nearly as much as we hoped and comes at the cost of overdiagnosis and overtreatment."
Translation: screenings definitely find lots and lots of tumors that turn out to be cancerous, but we shouldn't waste our time treating them.
Personally, the notion that cancer could ever be "overdiagnosed" seems absurd. I for one, am not willing to take the chance that I could one day have it, but not treat it. Hear that Suzanne Somers.
I've already got my yearly mammogram scheduled for December, and would schedule next year's right now, too, if I could. I like the peace of mind knowing that someone is looking deep into my breast's tissue, just to make sure no tumors -- life-threatening or otherwise -- have taken up residence.
The ACS official stance is blurry. In an official statement, it said "the advantages of screening for some cancers have been overstated," but it continues to endorse screening for breast, colon and cervical cancers. Sorry prostates. Guess you're not worth saving.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-26-2009 @ 7:44PM
Jim said...
In all likelihood, you've lost someone to cancer, so the idea that some screenings might not be helpful makes you upset (perhaps it makes you feel helpless about cancer?), but frankly, what you personally think about the subject is irrelevant. The entire point of looking at these overall statistics, after all, is to see if the "conventional wisdom" has any merit. So, your knee-jerk reaction to criticize the findings isn't helpful. This is exactly the sort of thing that contributes to the rise of health care costs: you the patient just "know" that you need extra tests, regardless of whether it's actually useful.
My guess is that whenever you see the word "cancer" you equate it with "death sentence," but what if, for example, in the course of a lifetime the average person actually gets several cancerous tumors that are dealt with before they're actually harmful? Finding tumors that the body would normally handle and starting chemo, radiation, etc. would absolutely be overtreatment (and cancer treatment is not fun).
In short, we don't know everything, and I'd rather have statistical feedback that this or that actually improves longevity and quality of life rather than dogmatically holding on to medical principles that we follow just because we can't imagine them not being true.
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