January 30th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Health Tips, Opinion
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We’ve seen it before. A couple of years ago, I wrote about Roswell Park’s Prostate Club for Men offering “Prizes For Prostates” — Buffalo Sabres hockey tickets or Buffalo Bills football tickets among other awards for men who showed proof that they talked to their doctor about prostate cancer.
Now a bunch of Georgia radiotherapy centers and the Morehouse School of Medicine are among those promoting the “Georgia Prostate Cancer Coalition” and luring men in for PSA blood tests by offering them Atlanta Hawks basketball tickets.
They also promote this misleading statistic: “One in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime.” No explanation is given of what lifetime risk means. And no explanation is given of how many of these “cancers” are indolent and would never have harmed a man. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 26th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Health Tips, Opinion
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The February issue of Prevention magazine has an article entitled “Surprising Faces of Heart Attack” profiling “three women (who) didn’t think they were at high risk. Their stories are proof that you could be in danger without even knowing it.” No, their stories are not proof of that.
The story is about three women in their 40s. The story varyingly states that the three should have had the following screening tests:
— Advanced cholesterol test, carotid intimal medial thickness test ( CIMT)
— Advanced cholesterol test and stress echocardiography
— Cardiac calcium scoring and CIMT
There’s an accompanying piece: “7 Tests You’re Not Having That Could Save Your Life.”
I asked one of our HealthNewsReview.org medical editors, Harold Demonaco, director of the Innovation Support Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital, to review the two pieces. As his day-job title suggests, he deals with review of the evidence for new and emerging healthcare technologies. He wrote:
The section “7 Tests you are not having that could save your life” states: “If you have not had these cutting edge screenings, put this magazine down and call your doctor. Now.”
Wow. While much of the information is correct, it is the context that is disturbing. Suggesting that these tests are essential in everyone is a bit over the top. Some of the information provided for each test is basically correct. However in some cases the recommendations go well beyond national guidelines.
The major issue here is the tacit assumption that tests are infallible, without any downsides and are always a good thing. That is simply not the case. So who should get these tests? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 22nd, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Health Policy, Opinion
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In a recent issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), journalist Ray Moynihan wrote: “Beware the fortune tellers peddling genetic tests.” (Subscription required for full access.) Excerpts:
“For anyone concerned about the creeping medicalisation of life, the marketplace for genetic testing is surely one of the latest frontiers, where apparently harmless technology can help mutate healthy people into fearful patients, their personhood redefined by multiple genetic predispositions for disease and early death.
…
Again a tool that’s proved useful in the laboratory has escaped like a virus into the marketplace, incubated by entrepreneurs, lazy reporters, and the power of our collective dreams of technological salvation, this time in the form of personalised medicine to treat us according to our individual genetic profiles.
…
Evaluating genetic tests is a complex business, requiring assessment of how well the test measures what it claims to measure, how well the genetic variation predicts actual disease, how useful the results are in terms of treatment, and what the social and ethical issues might be. Clearly there’s potential for exaggerating the value of a genetic test, which is one reason Germany has imposed severe restrictions on direct-to-consumer testing. In the United States they’re talking of a new test registry on a government website, raising immediate concerns that it could lend legitimacy to unproved and potentially harmful products. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 19th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Opinion
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That’s the question Dartmouth’s Dr. Gil Welch asks in a column on the CNN website. He reflects on [recent] news about a test in development that might find a single cancer cell among a billion healthy ones — as so many news stories framed it. Welch analyzes:
“But it’s not that simple. The test could just as easily start a cancer epidemic.
…
Most assume there are no downsides to looking for things to be wrong. But the truth is that early diagnosis is a double-edged sword. While it has the potential to help some, it always has a hidden side-effect: overdiagnosis, the detection of abnormalities that are not destined to ever bother people in their lifetime.
Becoming a patient unnecessarily has real human costs. There’s the anxiety of being told you are somehow not healthy. There’s the problem that getting a diagnosis may affect your ability to get health insurance. There are the headaches of renewing prescriptions, scheduling appointments and keeping them. Finally, there are the physical harms of treatments that cannot help (because there is nothing to fix): drug side-effects, surgical complications and even death. Not to mention it can bankrupt you.
Americans don’t need more diagnoses, they need the right diagnoses.
I don’t know whether this test will help some patients. It might, but it will take years to figure that out. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
January 12th, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in Health Policy, Video
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Comedian Stephen Colbert, who says he is “a huge supporter of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation,” nonetheless took a sarcastic swing at the organization this week “for spending almost a million dollars a year in donor funds to sue…other groups” for using the phrase “for the Cure” in their promotions.
We blogged, “Who owns pink ideas or cure slogans? Welcome to the Charity Brawl” back in August after the Wall Street Journal (to our knowledge) first reported the story.
Then in December, the Huffington Post reported that “Komen has identified and filed legal trademark oppositions against more than a hundred of these Mom and Pop charities, including Kites for a Cure, Par for The Cure, Surfing for a Cure and Cupcakes for a Cure — and many of the organizations are too small and underfunded to hold their ground.”
Colbert said: “If they don’t own the phrase ‘for the Cure,’ then people might donate money thinking it’s going to an organization dedicated to curing cancer, when instead it’s wasted on organizations dedicated to curing cancer.”
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
