To screen or not to screen.
All screenings lack efficiency because they rely too often on biaised and underpowered statistics. Healthcare business makes tremendous benefits out of well established and easy profit earning processes from screenings to treatments; therefore patients enlightened consent is under influence. In the wealthiest parts of the world, this field of public health sciences impulses studies with intense statistical analysis of tiny differences. About total and cancer specific death rates, meaningful studies should involve over 1,000,000 people. First, who is going to pay for such studies and, if it takes so many people to be sure, the benefit must be very small. In our lifetime, we believed in many concepts only to realise how wrong we were. This will probably be the case for cancer screening.
Grosjean
O
O
Dpt of Radiology, University of Liège, Liege, Belgium. oscar.grosjean@skynet.be
D003256:Community Participation; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D042241:Early Diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000191:economics / Q000592:standards / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000401:mortality / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011159:Population Surveillance; D011634:Public Health; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D012107:Research Design; D015996:Survival Rate