Has someone you know gotten really sick? Liver failure. Quadruple bypass. Cancer. You start looking for signs and symptoms. You get yourself worked up because YOU MIGHT BE NEXT. This is called fear: what happened to them could happen to you. So watch out. Emotionally, you look for the closest rock to hide behind or tree to climb.
Peter Jennings died last week from lung cancer. Jennings was a smoker. He’d quit some time ago, but the damage was done. A fact that did not feature prominently in discussions of his passing. Newspaper articles about other well-known people with lung cancer blossomed.
According to an Associated Press article, what this upwelling of lung cancer news started was a mini-stampede of smokers and ex-smokers to doctors to get a CT scan in search of lung abnormalities. I COULD BE NEXT.
In a surprise, the cancer establishment, led by the American Cancer Society, doesn’t recommend CT scans. And for an interesting reason: the chance of a false positive (when the test says you’ve got it but you don’t). Anywhere from a quarter to over half of CT scans produce false positives. That leads to painful and expensive diagnostic procedures and treatments with possible complications like a collapsed lung for a condition you don’t have.
In fact, the US Preventive Services Task Force doesn’t recommend any screening technique for lung cancer because none has shown a benefit in survival rates.
Entirely left out of this story is that CT scans bombard your lungs and your heart with ionizing radiation at much higher concentrations than regular X-rays. John Goffman’s work makes a strong case for radiation causing heart disease.
This doesn’t blunt the enthusiasm of some physicians for CT scans. Even though there is no evidence that CT scans improve survival rates, one enthusiast said, “I can’t believe it wouldn’t.”
The AP article suggests that this rush to CT scans isn’t just the result of physicians pushing an unproven procedure. It’s also the result of people freaked out about BEING NEXT.
Fear is not a bad thing. It focuses your attention on what might harm you. Like all your emotions, it’s your body giving its opinion about what and what not to do. You can use your fear to make an informed decision. But not by having it hijacked by a system prone to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. What you need is to know what to do about and with your fear. You need to know what your alternatives are for protection, diagnosis, and treatment. In other words, where are all the rocks and trees. So you won’t be next.
