By Leslie Kernisan, MD
 Have you ever asked yourself, when considering cancer screening for an older adult, whether the likely harms outweigh the likely benefits? Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. The sentence above, after all, is a bit of wonky formulation for the following underlying questions:
As for the second question, I’m not sure how often it pops up in people’s minds, although it’s certainly very important to consider, given what we now know about the frequent harms of cancer screening in the elderly, and usually less frequent benefits. Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that “inappropriate” cancer screening remains common. “Inappropriate” meaning the screening of people who are so unwell and/or old that they’re unlikely to live long enough to benefit from screening. For instance, one astounding study found that 25% of physicians said... |
