Anyone listening to the Radio this week will have picked up on the moral panic that large numbers of women are failing to take up the offer of Screening. This may be important, but as I've just done the Bowel Cancer Screening it made me wonder about the efficacy and cost of these massive nationwide screening programs. And so Breast Cancer Screening provoked my interest.
Apparently, Breast Cancer Screening saves 800 lives a year - a very positive statistic regardless of the cost. But most interesting for me, at least, was the fact that Breast Cancer Screening also led to 4000 unnecessary surgical procedures on patients who were perfectly healthy. And, thinking back, there have been these regular scandals about women presenting for screening and, because of the inefficiency of the service, cases of breast cancer have been missed.
How does cost/benefit analysis (judgements), for the individual woman, work in a situation like this.