Watch Money & Medicine on PBS. See more from Need To Know.
Screening is defensible if most, if not all, of the following goals are met. First, the screening must detect something that is meaningful to me, some important disease or high likelihood of an important disease. Second, the screening must be efficient; it must have few false positives and few false negatives. And finally, if a true positive is detected, something meaningful can be done about it, something that provides much more benefit to me than harm. Screening for prostate cancer fails on all counts.
Hadler, Nortin M. (2011-12-01). Nortin Hadler's Healthcare Trilogy: Includes Worried Sick, Stabbed in the Back, and Rethinking Aging . University of North Carolina Press.