Four bags of sand are more useful than lung cancer screening

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted that four sandbags are more helpful than lung cancer screening and that I was going to explain it to my lung surgeons. After all, they will soon have to have surgery for this lung cancer. People immediately replied that they did not believe it. However, it is not that complicated to explain that there are more important things than population screening.

I used Mrs. Water as an example. She fell accepting a parcel for the neighbours. When I got in, I stumbled over the threshold. Fortunately it didn’t break anything this time. She is 74 years old, but she looks ten years older. When she had a stroke in 2014, she had been smoking for thirty years. Since then she walks poorly and falls regularly. Like the whole neighborhood, her front garden calmed down, so that the height of the stumbling block became about 20 cm. The housing association does not want to raise the sidewalk.

if Elderly people fall and break their hips, It often ends badly: Six months after this fracture, 41 percent of frail elderly people (thin and over 80), half of the survivors are no longer able to go home, and only 39 percent can go for a walk outside. So preventing falls through four bags of sand under the overhanging sidewalk seems very effective. There is no dedicated lobby for sidewalk sand.

The situation is different with lung cancer screening. There was already one lobby Before there are hard numbers about effectiveness. These are CT scans of people, like Ms. Water, who smoke or have smoked for a long time. You have to track them down, and since it is not mentioned anywhere who smokes so much and for so long, you have to come up with something for that. In one study, Dutch researchers had to send out 600,000 questionnaires to track 15,000 people willing to participate. Half of them got CT and the other half didn’t.

Ten years later The same number of people died in the two groups: 13.9 versus 13.8 per thousand person-years. Lung cancer mortality decreased: 2.5 versus 3.3 per thousand person-years. The researchers celebrated this as a huge success: The number of lung cancer deaths was reduced by 26 percent, and many lives were saved. Enter this population check. That will come, because the lobby is very powerful. After all, the chief researcher of Rotterdam, the current minister of the VWS, is a staunch advocate of population screening: a few weeks after the first wave of coronavirus in 2020 He thought starting population checks should be a priority† Not a word about broken or aching hips. Such a man never sees those overhanging sidewalks.

The demographic survey removes the real worry: In recent weeks, GPs have seen Ukrainian women who have been called in for cervical cancer screening because of the BSN number they just provided. The normal care They were not even arranged, let alone take care of the trauma. Moreover Heart Foundation is annoying During the week it collected, GPs overburdened, by the general appeal to go to the GP with vague complaints, to check whether you have heart failure.

Still an epidemic, lobby clubs standing in the way of effective care and real prevention. Therefore, only lobbyists support for sidewalk sand, better education and anti-smoking policy. By the way, lung surgeons understood it.

Just Zaat is a general practitioner.