Overdiagnosis is Pure, Unadulterated Harm
That's a quote from an article in today's New York Times by Gina Kolata, the finest journalist covering medical issues out there IMHO.
It appears that the American Cancer Society is about to take a stand, at long last, on excessive screening for breast and prostate cancers. It's a practice that results in few, if any, cures of otherwise lethal cancers but which is responsible for a vast amount of unnecessary morbidity. People in whom cancers which would never spread nor even produce symptoms are, thanks to modern techniques, diagnosed with the dread disease thereafter precipitating needless surgeries and treatments, not to mention worry and stress.
This is vindication for a woman I sat next to on a plane back from Washington D.C. several years ago. She was a researcher at one of the best cancer facilities in the country and she'd gone to present evidence to Congress that screening young women for breast cancer did little if anything to arrest the course of aggressive cancers but did lots of serious and needless harm to thousands of women annually. For her troubles she was accused by some breast cancer advocates of being a lackey of the insurance companies as they thought, I presume, that the only reason anyone would oppose mass screenings would be the costs involved. It's nice to see science prevail over emotion.
