Cancer Policy – why politicians should leave health to the experts

Referring to cancer screening, Labour are accusing the Conservatives of scare-mongering and say that their policy to end guarantees is a, “cowardly and frankly shameful response”. Labour’s Health Minister Mike O’Brien said: “They should explain why millions of people will have to wait longer, with them in Government, to find out if they have cancer. This is an incredibly important ambition for the NHS. A clear, costed and deliverable plan to bring cancer test waiting times down from more than a month for some people to just one week for everyone so that 1.5 million people will be seen more quickly.”



However, many senior doctors warn of the intrinsic dangers associated with screening and have been battling with Labour policy to ensure that screening is targeted at those people who need it. This would prevent patient anxiety, unnecessary irradiation (which causes cancer itself) and the inevitable ‘false positive’ results where patients are wrongly diagnosed with disease.



Politicians keep getting it horrendously wrong and would be advised to read the latest cancer screening articles by Rick Popert on prostate cancer and Nicolas Beechey-Newman on breast cancer screening.



If there was zero risk associated with screening, Labour's approach would be fine. But it is a fact that some perfectly healthy women will get breast cancer as a result of the X-RAY, and some men will be needlessly operated on as a result of an inaccurate prostate screening test. As the experts clearly point out, screening should be targeted at certain patient populations only, and current Labour policy seems to refuse to accept that
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