Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease

Description

Why wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right? Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you're facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong? 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. Foreword ......Page 10 Prologue: Seek and Ye Shall Find ......Page 12 One: The Whole Body Scan ......Page 16 Two: Screening for Eyeball Pressure ......Page 31 Three: Cholesterol Screening, Syndrome X, and Heart Scanning ......Page 42 Four: PSA Testing ......Page 56 Five: Mammography Screening ......Page 70 Six: Colon and Cervix Screening ......Page 81 Seven: Mental Health Screening ......Page 96 Eight: Self-Screening for Disease ......Page 110 Nine: Lung Screening for Cancer and COPD ......Page 121 Ten: Bone Screening ......Page 132 Eleven: Gene Screening ......Page 143 Epilogue: A Conversation Starter when Facing Screening ......Page 158 Bibliography ......Page 162 Endnotes ......Page 164 Acknowledgements ......Page 182 Index ......Page 184