Keep Your Head in the Sand: The NHS Saves Money

We all too often hear from those seeking better healthcare that we should follow the Brits NHS. Now perhaps we should spare a moment on understanding their approach. The best example is today in Cancer Research UK which tries to opine on the uselessness of cancer screening. As we have already noted the most recent attack was on PSA testing. The brilliant conclusion was that if you only tested a patient once, and if that test was positive you did a biopsy that was in my opinion useless, then the number of deaths was no different than if you did noting. In my opinion that equation leads to:

Nothing=Nothing

No surprise. I wonder what Lord Russell would have said?

Now to their other article:

Not all cancers are equal. Some grow fast and spread quickly, while others grow so slowly (or even not at all) that if they went undetected they wouldn’t cause any problems. Even if left untreated, a person wouldn’t be harmed by their cancer. When these harmless cancers are found they’re said to be ‘overdiagnosed’. This happens more often with certain types of cancer, and is usually tied to particular types of cancer screening that test people without symptoms, such as breast screening. The problem is that when these types of cancer are diagnosed early it’s impossible to tell the potentially harmful ones from the harmless ones. Everyone is then usually offered treatment. And this means that some will be exposed to the potential side effects of treatment, and worry of a cancer diagnosis, when they didn’t need to be. This is called overtreatment. Overdiagnosis is one of the key things to consider when working out the balance of possible benefits and harms of cancer screening. Keep in mind, overdiagnosed cancers aren’t the same as when a test finds something abnormal that turns out not to be cancer (so-called false positive test results), another risk of screening and many other types of test. An overdiagnosed cancer is a true cancer, but it’s one that wouldn’t have caused harm in that person’s lifetime.

So the Brits solution seems to be in my view; forget about screening. If you are going to die you are going to die, so live with it!