Depends on what kind of error you would endore. And that depends on who you are.
Fine and dandy to say there are too many false positives, biopsies, etc with mammograms and it is too costly if you are talking about a population.
But every woman I know would willlingly risk a false positive and a biopsy to avoid waiting on a cancer.
And that has to be taken into account.
Hubby is researching the group recommending this right now.All academics, nobody in practice who treats real people.
And you cannot say let the women pay for it if they wish. It would be differtent if the choice was fully explained and women could decide. But to pretend it is a better choice to delay mammograms is a lie. It is not a better choice. It is a cheaper choice.
“But every woman I know would willlingly risk a false positive and a biopsy to avoid waiting on a cancer.
As I said, so long as these women also are willing to bear the financial costs associated with these false positives, I have no problem with this choice. Everyone has a different degree of risk tolerance and in a free country, I shouldn’t be imposing my risk preferences on women, but neither should women be imposing their risk preferences on me by offloading these costs on somebody else.
“All academics, nobody in practice who treats real people.
The reality is, figuring out how to balance the benefits and harms of any medical procedure is a statistical exercise best undertaken by those with the training to do it carefully and accurately. Most clinicians don’t actually have this training, so however skilled they might be at the bedside, this skill doesn’t qualify them to make an accurate judgment about what is best for the average woman.
Too many people have their judgment clouded by unrepresentative anecdotes: “Well my sister found a lump in her breast at age 43, so if she’d followed this advice, she’d be dead.” They’re conveniently forgetting the hundreds or thousands of women who went through the pain and anxiety associated with biopsies, X-rays or MRIs of what turned out to be false positives. Not only is this costly in economic terms, but unnecessary biopsies and X-rays pose hazards to health. The Task Force evenhandedly toted up all the lives saved from breast self-exams, along with all the lives lost due to measures taken in response to false positives and concluded that on balance, there’s no evidence that breast self exam leads to fewer deaths. Thus, their recommendation was based on balancing benefits and costs measured in terms of HEALTH, not dollars and cents. It’s perfectly legitimate to question the data they used, the assumptions they made, how they combined the evidence etc., but tossing out their conclusions on grounds they lacked clinical experience is no more legitimate than concluding that 2 + 2 can’t equal 4 because a bozo like VP Biden said it was.