Seeking Sickness Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease

by Cassels, Alan; Welch, H. Gilbert

• ISBN13: 9781771000321
• ISBN10: 1771000325
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-24
• Publisher: Greystone Books

Summary

Everything you need to know to make informed choices about medical screening. Medical screening for prostate cancer, breast cancer, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, and other serious diseases and conditions seem to make sense, and some types of screening are indeed useful if done on the right person at the right time. Many other such tests are questionable, however, and can even be harmful. Yet every day there are new claims of one medical screening test or another. In this book, Alan Casselsdiscusses the most common and recommended types of screening and weighs the pros and cons of each. Do mammograms save lives? Is a colonoscopy necessary for everyone? Is it worth it to fork out thousands of dollars for a whole-body scan? In addition to exploring these and other questions, Cassels discusses the role of practitioners and profiteers in selling us the mantra of test early and test often." This succinct yet authoritative guide cautions that we must go into any type of screening with our eyes wide open and gives us the tools and information we need to make informed decisions about medical screening.

Author Biography

Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and is the co-author (with Ray Moynihan) of the international bestseller Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients. Dr. H. Gilbert Welch is a general internist whose research focuses on the problems created by medicine's efforts to detect disease early. Most of his work has focused on overdiagnosis in cancer screening. He is the author of Should I be Tested for Cancer? and Overdiagnosed.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Prologue: Seek and ye shall find	p. xi
The whole body scan: Who's really reaping the benefits, and why you don't need one	p. 1
Screening for eyeball pressure: Know the right questions to ask (for any screening test) and when to ask them	p. 16
Cholesterol screening, syndrome X, and heart scanning: The risk business of screening for risk	p. 27
PSA testing: What are the odds?	p. 41
Mammography screening: The politics, the promises, and the numbers	p. 55
Colon and cervix screening: Too much of a good thing?	p. 66
Mental health screening: We're crazy, just not that crazy	p. 81
Self-screening for disease: Planting the seeds of self-doubt	p. 95
Lung screening for cancer and COPD: Finding disease in every breath you take	p. 106
Bone screening: Selling screening	p. 117
Gene screening: When marketing precedes science	p. 128
Epilogue: A conversation starter when facing screening: What happens if I do nothing?	p. 143
Bibliography	p. 147
Endnotes	p. 149
Acknowledgments	p. 167
Index	p. 169
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