Will emphasis on screening be harmful to your health? - The Boston Globe

Will emphasis on screening be harmful to your health? - The Boston Globe:

"But a former government health researcher is concerned that political considerations are leading the Obama administration to lean too heavily on screening, which can have unexpected downsides. Dr. Kenneth Lin, a Washington, D.C.-based family physician who used to conduct research for the government agency that helped develop screening recommendations, wrote in a recent blog post that the government’s acronym PPIP — for put prevention into practice — should really stand for “prevention politics injures patients.’’

Those are fighting words, but Lin quit his job at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality last November after a meeting of independent experts to vote on recommendations for prostate cancer screening was unexpectedly delayed that month.

Lin blames politics and the maelstrom weathered by the Obama administration when those same experts — used by the government to set screening guidelines — downgraded mammography screening recommendations for women in their 40s, at just the time when the health care bill was being debated in Congress. The experts stop recommending routine screening of women in their 40s, leaving it up to women to decide with their doctors whether to have mammograms.

This touched off angry accusations that the government was trying to ration care to save money, and the furor ultimately led Congress to add specific wording to the bill stating that mammograms would be covered.

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