Cancer Screening - Essentially Useless

Experts Finally Begin Questioning Sanity of "Routine Screening"

Cancer experts are expressing increasing concern over the explosion of campaigns urging people to get regularly screened for a wide variety of cancers, warning that such programs may do more harm than good.

"It is a real problem," said Otis W. Brawley of the American Cancer Society. "They are doing things that might actually harm the people they want to help."

Brawley made his comments about supporters of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz's bill that would mandate an education program to promote breast cancer self-screening among young women. But the comments could just as easily apply to supporters of the American Urological Association's ad campaign urging prostate cancer screening, or the Light of Life Foundation's ads promoting screening for thyroid cancer.

There are now campaigns to promote regular screening for nearly every variety of cancer, based on the widespread popular belief that early detection of cancer is important in saving lives. Yet experts note that for the vast majority of cancers, there is little support for this belief.

In the absence of specific risk factors – like a history of smoking or family history of a certain kind of cancer – or symptoms – like a lump – there is no evidence that routine cancer screening reduces death rates. There are only three exceptions to this general rule, said the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of medical experts commissioned by Congress. Women should get regular pap smears starting at age 21 and mammograms starting at age 40, while all people should be screened for colon cancer starting at age 50. Of these three, the evidence for the usefulness of breast cancer screening is the weakest.

Critics of cancer awareness campaigns note that such campaigns can make people think that the risk of dying from cancer is actually much higher than it really is. For example, contrary to what the current ad campaign might suggest, only 1600 people die from thyroid cancer each year in the United States. An incorrect assessment of risk might lead people to perform unnecessary screenings that can actually be harmful. Read the entire article.

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