With the odds of about 1 in 2 people getting cancer at some point in their lives, why isn’t it protocol for everybody to get screened for cancer of all types more often? Like maybe every few years starting at the age of twenty? It seems most times it get caught is when somebody is complaining of a symptom, often times too late.
In: Biology
That’s just not practical, financially sensible, safe for patients, or even medically necessary. We regularly screen for cancers that it makes sense to screen for. For example, women get regular mammograms for breast cancer, men get regular prostate screenings for prostate cancer, older people get regularly colonoscopies for colon cancer, and people can get regular skin checks for skin cancer. We screen for those cancers because they’re the most common. People at higher risk for other types of cancers can get screened on an as-needed basis.
There are hundreds of other types of cancers, some more common and some very rare. It doesn’t make sense to be screening people for every possible type of cancer, especially ones that are rare or uncommon in that particular group of people.
Even if it did, it’s literally impossible. There simply isn’t enough medical equipment in the world to be doing all of those screenings. Every MRI and CT machine in existence would just be doing nonstop cancer imaging and nothing else. The healthcare system would grind to a halt because all we’d be doing is looking for cancer. There’d be no time or resources left to do any other kind of healthcare.
Even if the above weren’t true, it’s not safe to be doing all of that. Many types of cancers can’t be diagnosed without biopsies or CT scans. You can’t just be taking bits out of all of your organs all the time on the off chance you might have cancer. It’s also very unsafe to be subjecting people to all the radiation from CT scans. All that radiation exposure could actually *cause* cancer.
And even if all of the above were not true, it would be financially disastrous. Even if you propose that the government pay for all these screenings or that doctors must provide them free of charge, they money has to come from *somewhere.*
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