Aggregated News
I’ve complained in previous columns about excessive medical testing, which leads to unnecessary treatment and drives up health care costs. Overtesting helps explain why health-care costs for Americans are much higher than in any other nation, whereas our health ranking is low, roughly equivalent to that of Cubans.
The medical establishment is gradually acknowledging these hard facts, as indicated by a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment in Cancer: An Opportunity for Improvement.” The article was written by a working group formed by the American Cancer Institute last year “to develop a strategy to improve the current approach to cancer screening and prevention.”
The three authors state: “Over the past 30 years, awareness and screening have led to an emphasis on early diagnosis of cancer. Although the goals of these efforts were to reduce the rate of late-stage disease and decrease cancer mortality, secular trends and clinical trials suggest that these goals have not been met; national data demonstrate significant increases in early-stage disease, without a proportional decline...
The medical establishment is gradually acknowledging these hard facts, as indicated by a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment in Cancer: An Opportunity for Improvement.” The article was written by a working group formed by the American Cancer Institute last year “to develop a strategy to improve the current approach to cancer screening and prevention.”
The three authors state: “Over the past 30 years, awareness and screening have led to an emphasis on early diagnosis of cancer. Although the goals of these efforts were to reduce the rate of late-stage disease and decrease cancer mortality, secular trends and clinical trials suggest that these goals have not been met; national data demonstrate significant increases in early-stage disease, without a proportional decline...