Screening and treatment for cancer are supposed to help patients. But a recent study shows that these screening processes do a lot more harm and actually cause the death rate to climb than the disease itself. Check out the article we found at News Target.
A separate study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1979 discovered some of the most common procedures used to diagnose and treat breast cancer, which are still widely used today, have done nothing to lower breast cancer rates or increase breast cancer survival rates.
This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that cancer screenings are expensive and fraught with errors. Cancer screenings can themselves give rise to a slew of health problems. False positives, for example, which occur frequently, can lead to anxiety, gratuitous treatment and even death.
This is just as true for prostate cancer as it is for breast cancer, as explained by the researchers:
For example, prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing yields numerous false positive results. It contribute to over one million prostate biopsies a year. Prostate biopsies are associated with serious harms, including admission to hospital and death. Moreover, men diagnosed with prostate cancer are more likely to have a heart attack or commit suicide in the year after diagnosis or to die of complications of treatment for cancers that may never have caused symptoms.
The group elaborates that cancer screenings confuse people about their health prospects:
In one study, 68 percent of women thought that mammography would lower their risk of getting breast cancer, 62 percent thought that screening at least halved the rate of breast cancer, and 75 percent thought that 10 years of screening would prevent 10 breast cancer deaths per 1000 women. Even the most optimistic estimates of screening do not approach these numbers.
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Read Full Article: Cancer Screenings and Treatments Kill More People Than The Disease Itself, According to Research
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