While health reform falters, mammogram debate still rages

When a preventive-health panel stirred a storm last November by scaling back its guidelines for breast cancer screening among 40-somethings, Congress was quick to intervene. Indeed, it took just 17 days before senators unanimously agreed to bar the government from using those recommendations to inform federal coverage policies — public or private.

The message was clear: More screenings, not fewer, are better for women’s health.

Yet as the dust settles and Washington’s attention shifts elsewhere, some prominent physicians are questioning the wisdom of the congressional decision to swoop in so quickly to dismiss the expert recommendations. Writing this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, these doctors are blasting Congress for politicizing an issue they say is better left to medical science.

It’s not a new argument. Preventive care specialists and some journalists were making it in November. Still, that a respected medical journal has returned to the issue now is a good indication that, even if the Democrats’ plans for health reform have hit a wall after last week’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, the thorny debate over preventive health care is far from dead.

“Screening is not simply about benefit, it also causes important harms,” Steven Woloshin and Lisa M. Schwartz, both physicians at Dartmouth Medical School, wrote in the Jan. 13 issue of JAMA. “To make good decisions about screening, patients should understand the trade-offs.”

Read more at Michigan messenger’s sister site the Washington Independent