To prevent one additional breast cancer death, 1,000 women would have to get mammograms starting at age 40 rather than 50. But doing this would allegly result in roughly 500 of the 1,000 women getting false positive results at least once, and 33 of them getting unnecessary biopsies, according to Jeanne Mandelblatt of Georgetown University.
According to researchers on the side of the Task Force, the adage that prevention is better than cure loses its intuitive force when one scrutinizes the risks associat with preventive care such as radiation or hormone therapy on abnormalities that may never have become cancerous tumors as well as the anxiety they provoke.
Now, other experts looking at
the same data disagree on its interpretation. “We respect the task force, but we do not agree with dataset their conclusions,” says Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief mical officer of the American Cancer Society. “We are concern the same evidence we think supports beginning at age 40 is being interpret by others as not supporting mammography.”
Scientists looking at the evidence can disagree, but when they do, they point to the data in order to support their conclusions. Most politicians, on the other hand, do not look at the data and they can in good faith either accept or reject the experts’ recommendations since the experts do disagree. of these recommendations, and then leap a few light years ahead, with uncanny certitude, to a conclusion solar systems away from the data on which the recommendations were originally offer.
“This is how rationing begins
They will offer answers, explanations, and analogies with more certititude than the scientists who facebook customer quality feedback perus the data, and if their golden tongues wagg with enough vigor, people will believe them because it is easier to acquire information via gossip than it is to collect it ourselves.
Our indifference to doing our civic homework would not be a problem but for the fact that demagogues are able to clean email synthesize our indifference with their certainty to create political slogans but not political solutions. Resolution and confidence are virtues only when the answers are always obvious and unambiguous. But in the world of statistics in which researchers on both sides of the mammogram debate inhabit, and in the world of politics where the meaning of public opinion and the general will fluctuates, unsubstantiat certitude is the one cancer on democacy we should be screening for, every day.