Even without a concerted effort to promote screening, thyroid cancer incidence in the United States is up threefold since 1975. To reverse this trend, we need to actively discourage early thyroid cancer detection.Sometimes early diagnosis just means treating people who would have been fine, and for whom the risks of treatment are greater than the risks of the "disease."
What we really need, technologically speaking, is a way of figuring out which cancers are dangerous, and which ones are just going to sit there doing nothing until you die of something completely unrelated.
ReplyDeleteIt used to be that doctors never saw cancers that weren't extremely aggressive and life-threatening, and cancer treatment is still geared toward that subset of cancers. Cancer detection also assumes that a small, non-bothersome tumor is about to become a life-threatening one, and has just been fortunately "caught" at a very early stage. "A mammogram saved my LIFE!!!11!" is a common statement... but the odds are good that the mammogram just caused unnecessary and sometimes debilitating treatment, because "all cancer is deadly" and "the key is early detection".
That attitude is problematic when we can detect so many indolent cancers, but can't yet tell whether they're indolent other than by waiting and seeing.