Cancer Screenings Fell In The Last 10 Years

A study which was supported by a National Cancer Institute fellowship revealed that in the last ten years, the United States population did not meet Healthy People 2010 (HP2010), except for colorectal cancer. This was published December 27, 2012 in Frontiers in Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention.

I had never heard of the organization called Healthy People so I had to look them up. The organization was started in 1979. “Healthy People is a set of goals and objectives with 10 year targets designed to guide national health promotion and disease prevention efforts to improve the health of all people in the United States.” They only project and publish the goals every ten years. The last one out was 2010 and the recent one is for 2020.

Check them out here: Healthy People 2020

As you can imagine, this is not a good trend. If we continue to follow this downward trend, I feel there could be more cancer diagnoses at a much later survival date. I believe that the earlier you can catch something going wrong, the better chance of ﬁxing it. That is why Preventive Medicine is so important.

In the past couple of years I have been hearing on the news stations that there is not as much need to have mammograms or prostate cancer checks as there used to be. I totally disagree! It is my opinion that with Obama Care, there will be more notices that certain tests will not be needed. These tests will cost money and for those who are on the government insurance plans, the money has to come from somewhere.

I am not trying to be controversial, but I am trying to help people live longer, healthier lives. If there is a test that has been done for years and already proven that it can help save lives, why would we want to discontinue that? Just because people will have insurance, doesn’t mean they will have excellent health care. The quality of our health care is just as important or more important than Obama Care.

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