After years of hearing about the prudence of self-exam, and the routine screening for almost every type of cancer, including breast, ovarian, prostate, and others, new opinions are coming to light on the subject that brings this thinking into question.
One factor in this debate is the general costs applied to the healthcare systems as a whole over these types of screenings. For example, if a person goes in for a checkup and requests a quick screening for thyroid cancer, that person could go through a number of different experiences. They could be found to have absolutely nothing wrong with them; they could be found to have some minor irregularities requiring further testing; or they could be found to have a malignant tumor which requires a full array of cancer treatment. The vast majority of cancer screenings come out as negative tests, but those tests still add to the overall costs to the system.
What’s worse, whenever there are false positives in cancer screening tests, the patient not only must suffer through round after round of subsequent tests, but he or she will also fall victim to the anxiety that comes with the uncertainty of the situation.
According to the Journal of General Internal Medicine, “Breast cancer affects over 175,000 women in the United States each year, but its impact is felt by far more individuals than just those who have the diagnosis. With increased public awareness of the disease have come increased levels of anxiety. Women perceive breast cancer as their greatest health risk, even though they are far more likely to die from coronary heart disease. This erroneous perception is probably magnified by many women’s personal experience with a friend or relative struck with the disease in the prime of her life. The fear of breast cancer often factors into a woman’s decision on whether to pursue hormone replacement therapy. Yet, despite these fears, not every woman is being screened appropriately, and a host of other issues, including cost, inconvenience, and discomfort from the procedure, are often cited by patients as the reason.”
New cancer awareness and screening campaigns do much to exacerbate the fallacy that more screening represents the key to protecting oneself from cancer. Not to mention the added costs and burden on the healthcare system. In a New York Times article by Natasha Singer, Dr. Ned Calonge, the chairman of the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is quoted as saying, “There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad…the possible bad outcomes are results that falsely indicate cancer and cause needless anxiety and unnecessary procedures that can lead to complications; that fail to diagnose an existing cancer, which could lull a patient into ignoring real symptoms as the cancer progresses; that detect slow-growing or stable cancers that are not life-threatening and would not otherwise have required treatment; and that detect aggressive life-threatening cancers whose outcome is not changed by early detection.”
Obviously cancer screening is not going to go away, nor should it, but there remains a fundamental question of what is the most efficient and effective way of assuaging the public fears about the disease.