by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
If you are a male over the age of forty you are no doubt familiar with getting a PSA blood test done for prostate cancer. As a test it has some advantages over “some other methods” that physicians use to check for abnormalities in the prostate.
PSA tests of course have been in the news lately, as the debate on whether they cause more harm than good has come full circle with the new suggestions being that the test be dropped for most healthy men. The problem is that it produces a large number of false positives, and in the age of treating every disease aggressively this leads to a lot of aggressive treatment.
While prostate cancer is not a joke, it generally is a slow evolving cancer, and many men are actually better off without the cancer being treated as the side effects of the treatment may be worse than the effects of the cancer.
This is something to consider when we think about risk management. Some of our risk management “cures” may be worse than the risk itself. H. Gilbert Welch, who is a physician and author of the book “Over Diagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health”, is quoted in a May 29 USA Today article as saying “when you are dealing with well people, the balance is really fine: It’s hard to make a well person better, but it isn’t hard to make them worse”. This is a balance we need to keep in mind when dealing with corporations and organizations.
No comments:
Post a Comment