First, there has never been a clinical study that show removal of polyps outweighs the risks of removal complications. More importantly, your GI spends 9 minutes in the colon and is looking for cancer through a scope visually. Third, aggressive cancers can kill you in two years. What is the colonoscopy interval? 10 if no history or prior polyps and 5 years if so and 3 years if both? You can do a Cologuard every year if you want or like I do: a cologuard then a FIT, another FIT and back to Cologuard in year three. Finally, there has never been a clinical study as to what is actually the colonoscopy false negative rate which is everything one worries about. Why? Because they can’t do a follow up colonoscopy on a person who has tested negative in clinical trials due to the risk of side effects.
So they claim “gold standard” but it is anything but. Actually a colonoscopy is useless except for the “lucky” person who develops colon cancer in the year before his every 5 or 10 year colonoscopy and gets his cancer detected.
What’s an FIT?