Originally published August 22 2005
Medical scan can lead to false positive results
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The imprecise nature of helical CT scan results may lead to false positive results, unnecessary surgery and undue anxiety.
If a simple, painless test can find the world's deadliest cancer when it is smaller than a pea - and such a test does indeed exist - shouldn't people who are most at risk have one?
They are waging an uphill battle as frightened current and former smokers rush to get a special kind of X-ray that other physicians are urging for lung cancer detection but that has not yet conclusively been shown to save lives.
Those deaths, and the news that "Superman" widow Dana Reeve has lung cancer, have scared smokers, leading many to try to kick the habit.
Charlotte Hofer of the American Cancer Society in Sioux Falls said calls to the South Dakota Quit Line have tripled.
"I think that when a national figure dies from smoking or someone is diagnosed who is in the public eye, it brings more attention to the disease," she said.
Patricia Dowds and her husband, David Byrom, psychologists from Long Island, are among the many former smokers who had the $300 test.
For every cancer these scans detect, many more "false positives" occur - harmless bumps and lumps leading to painful, expensive and unnecessary biopsies and surgeries.
Even when cancers are found, experts argue whether that's a benefit or a risk.
No one knows how many of these tumors are so slow-growing that they pose less of a health threat than the surgery, radiation and chemotherapy used to treat them.
The scans' biggest proponent is Dr. Claudia Henschke, director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
She published a landmark paper in 1999 reporting that the scans found far more lung tumors than conventional chest X-rays.
Muroff, 78 at the time, had smoked, but not for 20 years.
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