Brief follow-up comment to yesterday’s post about
psychological costs in a diagnosis of cancer.
And that comment concerns my frequent carping about the
hazards in over-testing, especially testing for cancer.
This psychological cost – that once you’ve heard the word
cancer linked to your name, you’re likely to suffer some kind of long-term if
not permanent psychological scar from that possibility – is one of the
strongest reasons to thoroughly inform yourself about the cancer screening
tests you choose to get because all cancer screening tests have a large false
positive rate, meaning that lots of people are told they may have a certain
cancer – particularly breast and prostate = on the basis of a screening test,
which turns out to be a false alarm on further testing.
But that false positive still leaves a psychological scar,
which may be worth risking, or maybe not, depending on the kind of person you
think yourself to be.
