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If someone’s going to tell us what to do — and in the words of Tears for Fears, “everybody wants to rule the world” — they should at least be consistent.
That’s certainly been the case when it comes to women’s health issues the past couple of weeks.
First, a government panel comes out and says that maybe women shouldn’t have mammograms as often as they’ve been advised to. The old guidelines said that women should routinely be screened for breast cancer after age 40; now, a report from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force says they should wait until after 50 to start. The reasons:
• Risk/reward. Mammograms early and often produce problems of their own, and not that many cancers are caught before age 50.
• Cost/benefit. There is a financial cost to the tests, and if they are not finding breast cancer, the number of tests should be delayed.
Then, another report — from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a doctor’s group instead of a government committee — recommends less-frequent Pap tests for cervical cancer. Instead of annual tests, the new recommendation calls for tests every two years for most women.
There is a big question over these back-to-back flip-flops: How safe do you want to be?
I have a proposal to reduce traffic deaths: Ban driving. If there are no vehicles on the road, no one will die in traffic accidents. The economy will grind to a halt, but hey, we’ll keep people safe on the highways, won’t we?
I have a proposal to eliminate the possibility that bad guys will break into your house and steal your TV, your computer, and the cash stuffed under your mattress: Post an armed guard in your front yard 24 hours a day. Sure, it’ll be expensive, but don’t you want to be safe?
I don’t say these things merely to be a wise guy. That’s a side benefit. I exaggerate for emphasis. No one is ever going to be completely safe. The people who study the risk/reward, cost/benefit issues have made reasoned recommendations.
(And yes, I’d feel the same way if they made the same kind of recommendations about something pertaining to men’s health, too. Whatever else I am, I am not a sexist.)
The recommendations come out at an interesting time, when the debate over health care reform is in full bloom. It reminded me of a conversation I had with the late Kent McCoy 30-plus years ago when Kent was the president of what was then Huntington Memorial Hospital. I was doing an issues-oriented “newsmaker” interview, asking him questions about health care. I asked him — remember, this was three full decades ago — what he thought the biggest headache would be for health care going forward.
He said it would be cost. He said technology would make it possible to do miraculous things to restore sick people to life — but it would cost money.
He would do everything he could to keep his mother alive, he said. The question is: How much would I do to keep his mother alive?
I have never forgotten that question.
Health care costs. Two reports on women’s health issues address the costs — but there are some risks.
The choice, as always, is up to you. How much do you want to spend on yourself or your loved ones?
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