Why Some Cancer Screenings Are Ineffective and Drive Up Health Care Costs

Most types of cancer screening have not been proved to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer, according to Dr. Barnett S. Kramer, the associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health, and tend to drive up health care costs with unnecessary and expensive followup treatments, and increase the risk for health complications in the future.

The federal Centers for Disease Control also agrees no medical proof exists that regular screening for lung, prostate, ovarian, and skin cancers actually saves lives.

Only three regular cancer screenings have been shown to reduce the related mortality rate — mammograms for 40+ women, pap smears for cervical cancer over the age of 21, and colon cancer for those 50+, with cervical and colon screenings being of greater consequence.

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Study: The Healing Power of Prayer

Brandeis University News: Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them? For thousands of years some people have believed so. But new Brandeis University research in the June 2009 Journal of Religion shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer — the prayer of strangers at a distance — actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.

Intercessory prayer has been the subject of scientific study since at least the nineteenth century, when an English scientist, assuming that kings were prayed for more often than others, sought to find out whether those prayers were answered. He concluded that they were not, but that prayer might be a comfort to the people praying anyway.

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