Testing early, often key to detection

I read the article in The Herald’s Good Life section on cancer screening tests. (Feb. 2 article, “Mammogram: Now or later?”)

So you have a screening test and it comes back negative.

You don’t have cancer, oh, happy day!

You have a test and it comes back positive , but it is a false reading.

Again happy day!

You have a test and it comes back positive. Cancer has been detected.

The cancer has been detected early and can be treated. The chances of survival is great. Again happy day!

To not have a screening test because you don’t fit the guidelines set up by a committee that sees you only as a statistic, fear of the discomfort of the test or modesty, fear of having a male technician give you a mammogram or a female doctor giving you a prostate check, is convoluted thinking and reasoning.

The losers of this debate on cancer screening tests are the friends and family of those who followed the guidelines and bought into the fear rhetoric about the screening tests and died because cancer was not detected early.

The winners are the insurance companies that don’t have to pay for the tests.

Leslie Mutchler

Everett