Do Cancer Screening and Treatment Improve Patient Outcomes?

ByPrimary Researcher

Executive Summary

  • Cancer screening is widely considered to be something that everyone should do.
  • What are the outcomes of cancer screening?

Introduction

Cancer screening is considered a perfect way to protect one’s health. Let’s see what the effectiveness of cancer screen is in terms of outcomes.

Go to top

The following quotes are from the article The Efficacy of Surgical Treatment of Cancer – 20 Years Later.

Important Point #1: The Lack of Evidence for Benefits from Cancer Screening

None of the seven indirect methods used showed that surgery clearly affects the course of the disease for any type of cancer. The lack of benefits from cancer screening now includes not only from breast cancer but also from bowel, lung, prostate and ovarian cancer screening.

A primary reason for this outcome is that the treatments the medical establishment offers those who receive a positive cancer test screening are poor. This is explained in the following quotation.

Important Point #2: No Improvement from Treatments and “Early Detection”

An RCT (randomized control trial) was carried out among more than 70,000 women in the general US population to see if early detection of ovarian cancer could reduce mortality. All of the women were post-menopausal and aged 55–74.

The screening was done as part of the prostate, lung, colorectal and ovarian (PLCO) cancer screening trial mentioned above. The 35,000 in the screened group were offered a blood test that measured a cancer marker CA-125 and at the same time offered screening using transvaginal ultrasound to detect enlarged or abnormal ovaries. Another 35,000 women not offered screening made up the control group.

The Outcome

This screening did not result in any reduction in deaths from all causes. In fact there was a non-significant 18% increase in deaths from ovarian cancer attributed to harm from post-screening surgical intervention.

So again this indirect method does not provide evidence that surgery affects the course of the disease by early detection using screening for breast, bowel, lung, prostate or ovarian cancer.

Quite amazing. This illustrates that the understanding of cancer has regressed from an earlier state of higher knowledge concerning localization.