The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients They Claim to Find

[John Hilton]

The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients (which) They Claim to Find

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/th...at-manufacture
note: article kindly posted by Ewan in next post below

[Ewan]

Posted by John Hilton (here)
The 12 Screenings That Manufacture the Patients (which) They Claim to Find

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/th...at-manufacture

In 2022, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the NordICC trial — the first randomised controlled study of colonoscopy screening ever conducted. Over 84,000 people were followed for ten years. The trial found an 18% reduction in cancer incidence and no significant reduction in cancer deaths. To prevent a single case of colorectal cancer, 455 people had to be invited for screening. To prevent a single death, the numbers were statistically indistinguishable from zero.¹

This is the pattern.

Across the major screening programmes — mammography, PSA, Pap, colonoscopy, lung CT — when the question is whether the screened population actually outlives the unscreened population, the benefit largely disappears.² The statistic the programmes advertise is disease-specific mortality: deaths from the disease the test is looking for. The statistic they bury is all-cause mortality: whether the screened group, taken as a whole, lives longer. The two numbers are not the same. You can reduce deaths from one disease while total deaths remain flat — because treatment has killed as many people as the disease prevented, or because the disease you found was never going to kill anyone.²

The screened do not live longer than the unscreened. They are more likely to spend their remaining years monitored, biopsied, cut, and medicated for conditions that would not have harmed them. This essay catalogues twelve tests that produce that conversion, organised by the four mechanisms through which it is achieved.

Always handy to give others a clue about what they might find at the link imo. Cheers, John.

[John Hilton]

Posted by Ewan (here)
Always handy to give others a clue about what they might find at the link imo. Cheers, John.

1. The clue is in the title.
2. I won't infringe copyright. It isn't my article. I couldn't commit the time to list everything that the article covers.
3. If you like the article, please click on the link and click the "like" button.

[RunningDeer]

Adding this section to the article:

How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old

Some grown-ups have machines that look inside your body to find things that might be dangerous. They say finding things early is good, and going to the doctor sounds safe.

Here is what they don’t tell you. The machines find lots of small things that were never going to hurt you. Sometimes they find nothing at all and say they found something. Sometimes they find a piece of something and pretend it is the whole bad thing.

Once the machine says it found something, the grown-ups cut it out, or give you medicine to fight it, or make you come back every year to check. The cutting and the medicine often hurt you more than the thing would have.

The grown-ups also have a rule about what counts as sick. They get to change the rule. Every few years they change it so that more people are called sick. The people who change the rule are often paid by the companies that sell the medicine for being sick.

You can feel fine on Monday and be called sick on Tuesday, and nothing inside you changed. Only the rule changed.

[ThePythonicCow]

The twelve screenings considered:

1. Bone Density (DEXA) and the Manufactured Pre-Disease
2. Cholesterol
3. Blood Sugar -- "Prediabetes"
4. Mammography
5. Colonoscopy
6. CT Scan -- The Screening Test That Causes the Disease It Looks For
7. PSA Testing
8. Prostate Biopsy
9. Pap Smear and HPV Testing
10. PCR
11. Antibody Tests
12. BRCA Testing and Prophylactic Mastectomy