This article in the New York Times, is interesting. I'd never heard the term, "incidentalomas" before.
“We need a 21st-century definition of cancer instead of a
19th-century definition of cancer, which is what we’ve been using,” said
Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer
Society, who was not directly involved in the report.
The impetus behind the call for change is a growing concern among
doctors, scientists and patient advocates that hundreds of thousands of
men and women are undergoing needless and sometimes disfiguring and
harmful treatments for premalignant and cancerous lesions that are so
slow growing they are unlikely to ever cause harm.
The advent of highly sensitive screening technology in recent years
has increased the likelihood of finding these so-called incidentalomas —
the name given to incidental findings detected during medical scans
that most likely would never cause a problem. However, once doctors and
patients are aware a lesion exists, they typically feel compelled to
biopsy, treat and remove it, often at great physical and psychological
pain and risk to the patient. The issue is often referred to as
overdiagnosis, and the resulting unnecessary procedures to which
patients are subjected are called overtreatment.
No comments:
Post a Comment