Why Living in a Rich Country Can Give You Cancer

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As a primary care physician, I have counseled thousands of patients to get cancer screening—blood tests to look for prostate cancer, mammograms to detect impalpable breast cancers, and colonoscopies to find precancerous colon lesions. I’ve even tried to find cancers on physical exam, palpating people’s necks for thyroid growths, for example. The goal of all these screening tests was clear to me—find cancers early and we can get rid of them before they become life-threatening.
All the while, I knew there was a downside to much of my efforts. I was potentially finding “lesions” that, if untouched, would have never harmed my patients. I wasn’t just diagnosing cancer and its predecessors; I was overdiagnosing it. Two studies from Dartmouth physician Gil Welch brings new evidence of the surprising frequency of such overdiagnoses, including surprising data on the epidemic of overdiagnoses in rich countries like the U.S.A.
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PeterUbel