Word: panelings
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...brouhaha following a government advisory panel's recent change in breast-cancer-screening recommendations has proved anything, it is that even modern medicine does not rely on statistics, scientific facts and clinical outcomes alone...
...that undeniably reduces the risk of breast cancer is no longer being recommended for millions of women. Another worry: will insurance begin denying coverage of breast-cancer screens in women under 50 who want them? The Obama Administration quickly disputed that notion, as well as the suggestion that the panel's advisory was a government strategy to cut costs by rationing health care. "The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside, independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations," said Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. "They do not set federal policy, and they...
...after taking a more in-depth look at the numbers, the task force decided that the risks of mammography for women in their 40s do not outweigh the small benefit that the screens provide. On top of that, the panel recommended that doctors no longer urge women to perform monthly breast self-exams at home, citing a lack of scientific evidence to support that they save lives...
...panel also commissioned computer-modeling studies that weighed the benefits of routine screening (reduction in death rate) against its risks, depending on the ages of the women being screened and how often they were tested - every year or every other year...
Overall, based on a review of mammography trials, the panel found that having a yearly mammogram screening cuts the risk of breast-cancer death 15% in women ages 40 to 49. That reduction, it should be noted, is relative, not absolute. The absolute risk of breast-cancer death after age 40 is 3% without annual screening, according to the computer models. That means that with routine screening, which leads to a 15% lower risk of death from breast cancer, a woman's absolute risk drops to 2.6%. Small numbers in either case. Put another way, the panel concluded, the benefit...