COVER STORY SIDEBAR-Breast, prostate screenings are under scrutiny
The questions fly in the face of a medical concept that seems indisputable: The earlier the diagnosis, the better.
We learn the value of screening tests in movies, when a doctor shakes his head and says, “If only we’d caught it sooner.” We read about in the newspaper, where articles lead with the survival stories of patients who say their lives were saved by a routine screening.
We see it in annual races and pink ribbons and T-shirts calling for more mammograms, hospitals and clinics offering free prostate cancer screenings and TV personalities undergoing on-air colonoscopies.
Dr. Lynn Swearingen uses this device to digitally capture images as she looks through a microscope to examine slides of tissues from a breast cancer patient at Parkridge Medical Center.
Staff photo by John Rawlston/Chattanooga Times Free PressBut many doctors in Chattanooga and elsewhere are concerned about unquestioning acceptance of the value of routine screenings in healthy patient populations. Some fear that across-the-board screening can lead to unnecessary, costly and debilitating treatments for patents who never would have experienced any symptoms, let alone death, from their “disease.”