| 7
Health Tests You Just Don't Need
For people
who want reassurances of their health, a growing number of private
screening clinics and health tests have sprouting in recent
years. However, they can often produce misleading results if
examiners do not take account of people's backgrounds and their
likelihood of developing certain diseases. Most of these tests
also expose patients to unnecessary health risks. Here are 7
health tests you need to avoid:
Mammograms:
With toxic radiation, mammogram testing compresses sensitive
breast tissue causing pain and possible tissue damage. To make
matters worse, the false negative and false positive rates of
mammography are a troubling 30% and 89% respectively. Another
concern is that many breast cancers occur below the armpits;
however, mammography completely misses this auxiliary region,
viewing only the breast tissue compressed between two plates
of glass. Considering these drawbacks, breast thermography should
be given closer consideration. Thermography is a non-invasive
and non-toxic technique which can detect abnormalities before
the onset of a malignancy, and as early as ten years before
being recognized by mammography. This makes it much safer and
potentially life-saving health test for women who are unknowingly
developing abnormalities, as it can take several years for a
cancerous tumor to develop and be detected by a mammogram.
Chiropractic X-Rays: Chiropractors can do wonderful assessments
and treatments for a multitude of health problems. However,
they do rely on an abundance of X-rays from their patients to
make these assessments. It is not unheard of to have up to ten
or more X-rays on an initial visit to a chiropractor. Many health
experts have criticized Chiropractors who use X-rays only to
read slight anomolies in the spine to market and sell their
treatments. But most skilled chiropractors can assess and treat
patients without X-rays. Those who have natural, holistic practices
will only X-ray as a last resort or when a diagnosis is otherwise
impossible through an external clinical approach. Any X-ray
exposure is hazardous to the body, especially multiple doses
within a specific period. If you don't have an acute injury
or disabling condition, try and find a Chiropractor who doesn't
need to zap you to find what's wrong with you.
PSA testing: A PSA blood test looks for prostate-specific
antigen, a protein produced by the prostate gland. High levels
are supposedly associated with prostate cancer. The problem
is that the association isn't always correct, and when it is,
the prostate cancer isn't necessarily deadly. Nearly 20 percent
of men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, which sounds
scary, but only about 3 percent of all men die from it. The
PSA test usually leads to overdiagnosis -- biopsies and treatment
in which the side effects are impotence and incontinence. Moreover,
there is some evidence which suggests that biopsies and treatment
actually aggravate prostate cancer. During a needle biopsy,
a tumor may need to be punctured several times to retrieve an
amount of tissue that's adequate enough to be screened. It is
believed that this repeated penetration may spread cancer cells
into the track formed by the needle, or by spilling cancerous
cells directly into the bloodstream or lympathic system.
DEXA:
Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA or DXA) in a technique
developed in the 1980s that measures, among many things, bone
mineral density. The scans can determine bone strength and signs
of osteopenia, a possible precursor to osteoporosis. Limitations
abound, though. Measurements vary from scan to scan of the same
person, as well as from machine to machine. DEXA doesn't capture
the collagen-to-mineral ratio, which is more predictive of bone
strength than just mineral density. And higher bone mineral
density doesn't necessarily mean stronger bones, for someone
with more bone mass will have more minerals but could have weaker
bones.
CT and
Full-body scans: If you got extra cash, usually more than
$1,000, you may be tempted to get a full-body CT scan to find
everything wrong with you. Avoid that temptation. For the most
part, these are done so poorly by purely commercial enterprises
that the results are useless. The scan will definitely find
something abnormal that is likely of little concern. And it
could very likely miss something that is a concern. For example,
these scans aren't done with special contrast agents to look
for specific types of tumors or organ damage. You're left only
with a false sense of confidence. CT technology itself is extremely
harmful to the human body exposing patients to approximately
100 times the radiation of a standard chest X-ray which itself
increases the risk of cancer.
Home
Menopause Test: The home menopause test is almost in the
realm of hokum, despite its popularity with a generation of
women who grew up with the home pregnancy test. The test measures
levels of FSH, or follicle-stimulating hormone, in the urine.
Not only does the kit not measure this well, but FSH in the
urine is a poor indicator of menopause status. Perhaps of little
surprise is that FSH levels, like many female hormones, vary
from day to day, particularly for pre-menopausal women.
Home
Alzheimer's Test: The home Alzheimer's test is a scratch-and-sniff
test, useful according to the manufacturers because a loss of
smell can be an early sign of Alzheimer's disease. There's a
little truth here. Anosmia, a loss of smell, has been associated
with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. But that association
seems rare; most anosmics don't have a degenerative brain disease.
Your failure of the smell test is likely indicative of, well,
a smelling problem. Yet while the home test verges on the naive,
serious research continues on whether anosmia serves as some
sort of canary in the coal mine for burgeoning neurological
disorders.
|
