The Case Against Early Cancer Screening - (CHL)

Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times has an interesting "counter-intuitive" story about the potential downside of early cancer screening. Last week a panel of leading medical experts advised doctors to stop screening older men for prostate cancer, saying essentially that early detection presents more risks than it does good. One main reason why - at least in the case of prostate cancer in older men - is that a large percentage of prostate cancers are not deadly, and most older men would die of other causes and be minimally affected by slow growing prostate cancer. When you consider the invasiveness of prostate cancer treatment and its potential effects, weighed against the non-life threatening nature of the disease, it may be best to leave the prostate cancer untreated.