Shoot the Messenger

Amidst the uproar created by the USPSTF's decision to tell the truth about breast cancer screening, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has a solution:

Many oncologists, no doubt, would like to send Calonge and his colleagues off to Gitmo, where they could live out their years happily denying one another cancer screenings. Luckily, Congress has a simpler solution at hand: It can abolish the task force and turn it into a group that is more accountable to the public.

Why would we want to do that? Because they reported facts that cancer activists don't want to hear? Oh, that's a great way to get the truth from your scientific advisers; fire the ones who won't toe the line.

You might think that as citizens of a world built by science, we might have some conception of its power. But, no, we happily use our hi-tech cell phones and internet connections to spout medieval conceptions of how the world works. Here is Nancy Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure:

What works is what we know: early detection, awareness, research and treatment, and, yes, screening, mammography and self-awareness. Let me say it as clearly as I can, as a breast cancer survivor whose breast cancer was found with a mammogram at the age of 37. . . . Mammography saves lives.

If mammography saves lives, why can't anyone count the lives saved? When something changes the material world, it is a general principle of our science that we should be able to measure the effect. Sometimes this is difficult, but not in this case. It is, after all, rather easy to count how many people are alive and how many are dead. True, scientific studies often turn out to be wrong, and you should never take any one study too seriously. But we aren't talking about one study, we are talking about an area of medicine that has been intensely studied across the world for 40 years now. What Nancy Brinker thinks, or what you think, or what I think, just doesn't matter. The numbers are clear.

If we are serious about fighting cancer, we should follow the recommendations of the task force and put the money saved into the scientific study of cellular genetics. When we really understand cancer, we will be able to stop it, but not until then.