Cancer Screening Is Good, but Can It Be Good?

Doctors and patients alike are apt to think in terms of propensities. Cancer screening is good because it can detect cancers, cancer surgery is good because they can remove them. But thinking about costs and benefits, weighted by probabilities can flip good to bad. For every thousand women who undergo annual ultra sound exams for overian cancer, six are correctly diagnosed with the disease compared with five in a thousand unscreened women. The same is true for men when it comes to screening for prostate cancer. With the prostate specific antagen test, i opped out wonderful. It doesn't take a lot of moth to show that the expected utility of avarian cancer screening is negative. Weighing risks