Breast Cancer Screening: Where The Rubber Meets The Road
November 18th, 2009
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force unleashed a tsunami this week with new breast cancer guidelines that are suspiciously timed to current efforts to rein in burgeoning healthcare costs. Indeed, the recommendations appear to be geared towards reducing overtreatment by eliminating what the Task Force considers unnecessary follow up screenings and tests. The recommendations even suggest the breast self-examination (BSE) should be discontinued.
In essence, what the Task Force concluded was that while screening reduces deaths from breast cancer, it does not save enough lives to justify associated costs.
To exacerbate the controversy, the American Cancer Society has publicly stated that it does not endorse Task Force recommendations and in a detailed analysis suggested that in the review of the evidence, the committee got caught up in semantics (i.e. risk versus benefit) and that at the very least, computer modeling may be flawed in terms of its ability to translate statistical data into real life.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that many doctors are ‘staying the course,’ and in between anger and disbelief, women across the nation are crowding the phone lines trying to discern what is true and what’s not.
Have we all gone mad?
Obviously, these new recommendations will be echoing in the halls of hearings that will determine the future role of mammography in government-run health programs, private insurance programs and the current healthcare reform initiative. Already, Congress is calling for Hearings. But more importantly, is the debacle is a prime example of what ails our healthcare system and reflective some of the more important changes that must take place if we are ever going to move forward in a way that benefits all the players. Truly, who’s really in the driver’s seat?
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