Posted on 11/20/2009 8:07:42 AM PST by markomalley
Days after controversy erupted over new breast cancer screening guidelines, a US health group has said women should wait longer to get their first cervical cancer test.
The New York Times reported Friday that the American College of Obstetricians is now advising women to wait until age 21 to get their first Pap smear.
The advice is intended to cut down on unnecessary testing and reduce the risk of harmful invasive procedures to remove non-cancerous lesions that may show up on tests but often disappear if left alone, the group said.
The new recommendations overturn previous guidance, which suggested women should be tested yearly starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse.
In addition to waiting longer for a first test, the group said women over 30 with three consecutive normal test results can wait for three years before their next Pap.
The advice is likely to stir fierce debate as it comes shortly after controversial new guidelines for breast cancer screening that said women should get fewer mammograms.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
BEHOLD....Tis just the beginning of da gubmit healthcare system. Wittle, wittle, wittle... until they recommend all women have the children’s at home and if you die in child birth... well they just have one less on the gubmint dole.
Sheesh... what’s next?!
Excellent! You should make that your tagline!!!
This is the WORST possible recommendation!!! With the amount of teens nowadays engaging in unsafe sexual practices and with the percentage of women infected with HPV (which 99% of the time has NO symptoms) if they do not get YEARLY Pap Smears they will be DYING!
Pap Smears EVERY YEAR save lives! Who in the heck ARE these people??? This has EVERYTHING to do with “Obamacare” and nothing to do with REAL quality Medical Care!
I know my old OB/GYN who was head of some kind of a cancer board is going to be LIVID about this “recommendation”...
This is absolutely INSANE!!! How many of YOU would want to “wait and see” if a “Pre-Cancerous” legion disappears on its own or if it turns into cervical cancer????
OK, I’m just going to come out and say this because this is too important of a subject to keep quiet about out of embarrassment — if it weren’t for a pap smear I had when I was 19 years old I would’ve ended up with full-blown cervical cancer by the time I was 21! If I would’ve followed these guidelines I’d be DEAD RIGHT NOW!!!
What astonishes me about this report/decision, and the recent one re: mammograms, and moreover the entire peer reviewed literature, is this: They completely screw up the economics 101 of all of this.
Information creates real options. The bottom line question is, how do we value the option? Just maybe the information generated by these exams does not create enough option value to make the test worthwhile — and indeed this is what they’re hiniting.
But to my point — they are not approaching the question this way, and their methodology really sheds little or no light on the option value. So there is no reasonable inference to draw one way or the other.
More and more, medicine i= about diagnosis as much as it is about therapy. (In NBC’s hit show, Gregory House spends 58 minutes diagnosing; the actually therapy is in the last minute and an afterthought; and this is not all that blown out of proportion.) As such, this methodological fatal flaw is far more problematic than folks realize.
They want to give every little girl (and now boys!) Guardisil (untested on little girls at the time) at least a few years ago.
Now with ObamaCare, every organization wants to cut back. Interesting huh?
Yup. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious... the NOW can't complain against Dear Leader. He is screwing them...
oops .. my bad...
Yup. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious... the NOW can't complain against Dear Leader. He is screwing them...
oops .. no pun intended...
What a fu**** up society!
Six months ago, cervical carcinoma was so prevalent and dangerous that they were recommending young girls get vacinated with Guardasil. Anyone who refused were considered ‘religious nuts’ or simply ignorant on the subject. Now a few months later cervical screening is to be minimized. They changed the discussion because obama is deparate to get his predictable to fail program rammed through. Disgusting.
They are recommending LESS cervical exams, not more... The previous guidelines were to get a pap smear as soon as you are sexually active. We’re talking about an average (unfortunately) of about 5 YEARS before a girl will get her first pap smear after her first sexual encounter?
This is insanity!
Brilliant - Intrude on the patient - OBGY relationship as you are trying to steer Obamacare through the Congress.
And piss off women voters en masse in the process.
I’m with you (see my previous post on this thread for my personal story - embarrassing, but this is too important not to share with others so they can protect their children who sometimes make really stupid mistakes!!!).
It makes it even MORE important if there are things that women who are NOT sexually active get that can be found with a cervical exam!
This makes me VERY, VERY angry!!!
I believe that's the point.
Leftists like dead people. They're very reliable (D) voters.
Of course it is insanity...the kind of insanity that comes from knowing that they have no way to pay for quality health care for everyone so just take out the “quality” part and they are in business!
The possibilities are endless. No blood sugars drawn unless you are going blind and your foot is gangrenous. Do not check blood pressure until your kidneys fail and you have a stroke.
One more point to add: When I teach my MBAs about the economics of information, one of the key insights that comes very early is that people routinely underestimate the value of options. For obvious reasons, we consistently undervalue information.
So, for example, consider this simple number problem. We are considering 1) building a new factory, 2) retrofitting our existing factory, or 3) commissioning an engineering study to look at both options. Doing the engineering study first would be costly but would unambiguously resolve the uncertainty around which of the first two options is best. The question is this: What is the most we would pay for (i.e., what is the value of) the engineering study?
We put some $ costs and some probabilities to these problems, then ask the students to guess before even working out the answer. For the first dozen or so problems, the students routinely and consistently underguess.
My sense in looking over these and other reports is that they have the same bias against the value of information, and for many of the same reasons.
You are EXACTLY right, TOL!!! See my post up-thread (I’m not proud, but this is too important to be embarrassed about and if my story can convince parents to convince their daughters to DEMAND screenings then it’s worth whatever embarrassment I suffer... I would be DEAD if I followed this guideline in my life!!!
These recommendations ARE a Death Sentence!!! There are 99% of the time NO SYMPTOMS of HPV, and the ONLY way they detect it is with a pap smear!
This is now making me want to cry! These people are EVIL!
You shouldn’t be embarrassed. I suspect that many, many women (and their men/boyfriends) share similar youthful experiences. This is insanity. My daughter has ongoing health problems and we can’t find the source. She’s my only child and sometimes I grieve over not knowing what’s going on inside of her body. And I have a husband with genetic diabetes. I feel personally targeted by this congress and their overwhelming need for power that could end up killing my family. I get very angry when I get these stupid emails from my congressman justifying voting for this insane so-called health plan.
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