The authors of the paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, “Outcomes of Screening Mammography by Frequency, Breast Density, and Postmenopausal Hormone Therapy,” wrote: Controversy exists about the frequency women should undergo screening mammography and whether screening interval should vary according to risk factors beyond age. And concluded, as a result of the analysis they report: Women [...]
The cover story of the March edition of Consumer Reports is “The cancer tests you need – and those you don’t.“ You need a subscription to access the full content, but here’s a glimpse of what’s inside. The headings are: Overselling cancer tests A new understanding of the disease Misleading statistics Screening harms Colon-cancer screening [...]
Two months ago, I read on the BMJ website “Citizens’ jury disagrees over whether screening leaflet should put reassurance before accuracy.” I’ve been following some of the controversies in the British National Health Service’s breast screening program for some time. An example here. I asked Angela Coulter, PhD, to write a guest blog post about [...]
Nice catch by my colleague Andrew Holtz (one of our story reviewers on HealthNewsReview.org) as he combed the literature and settled on a paper in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease entitled, “Dementia Specialists and Early Adoption of Amyloid Imaging.” With Andrew’s permission, I am reposting his piece in its entirety. ————————————————— A new survey of [...]
A new analysis published in the Annals of Family Medicine,”Primary Care Physicians’ Use of an Informed Decision-Making Process for Prostate Cancer Screening,” found that 24% of primary care physicians who responded to a survey said they ordered screening without discussing it with patients. How’s that for shared decision-making? Fewer than 48% of those surveyed said [...]
Dr. Michael Kirsch, who claims that “when I’m not writing, I’m performing colonoscopies, has published a blog post, “Is Colonoscopy the Best Colon Cancer Screening Test?” It’s an excellent piece, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. It touches on medical conflicts of interest, comparative effectiveness research, the medical arms race, medical marketing [...]
Peter Ubel, M.D. is a physician and behavioral scientist at Duke University, and the author of Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together. I don’t know how I missed his November blog post that asked the question above, but I now know that it appeared on his own [...]
It started when somebody wrote a book review of the book by Dr. Otis Brawley, Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society, “How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick In America.” In it, the reviewer wrote: “Brawley isn’t an asshole, but he is a loudmouth, in the best possible sense. [...]
Read or listen to Richard Knox’s piece. Among several strong elements in his story, he profiles Shannon Brownlee’s decision to stop having mammograms: Health writer Shannon Brownlee of the New America Foundation says the issue is a prime example of what she calls American medicine’s tendency to overdiagnose and overtreat disease. She’s the author of [...]
As Reuters Health and many others are reporting, the American College of Physicians has issued new guidelines on esophageal cancer screening. Excerpt: “(The group) recommended limiting esophageal cancer screening to people with chronic heartburn who have additional, more severe symptoms. Known as upper endoscopy, the screening procedure is often used to diagnose and manage gastroesophageal [...]
It’s difficult to do an overview of melanoma drug research in a relatively brief story. But this story did a solid job.
Better than a competing piece by Reuters but still a little short on some details about this asthma drug study.
An adequate summary of this asthma drug trial’s design doesn’t make up for the overly optimistic tone about the drug’s future. A New York Times story was better.
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