Recommendations vs. Medical Standards vs Patient Preferences

How often do you get your teeth cleaned? Every six months, just like the ADA reccomends of course. Unless you have bad teeth like me and go every three months (and I hate having my teeth cleaned). There are guidelines that tell us all sorts of things - get the oil changed on your car, get a flu shot, get a colonoscopy, and get a mammogram.We usually follow these guidelines because they give us structure and a sense of how often we need to do these things. We listen to them because they are all in the ' preventive ' category - they help make us more likely to live longer and healthier. We may not understand all the reasons why but we obey like lemmings, until they change and we get confused if we don ' t understand why.But what if ' those people ' who make these decisions about what to do when took into account what the patients preferred?In 2006, the US Preventive Services Task Force (aka ' Them ' ) issued a statement that women over 50 should get mammograms every two years, unless their medical history dictated otherwise, instead of every year. And nobody thought to ask the patients what they wanted.Until a recent study announced at the annual meeting of the  Radiological Society of North America), which stated that 70% of women prefer annual mammograms. The reasons for concern over annual mammograms is for potential harms - false positives, cancers that would never become problematic, etc. The women asked were not as concerned about false positives or other harms ...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: cancer screening changes education Source Type: blogs