The modern era for skin doctors started in the 1980s when the American Academy of Dermatology hatched a plan to contrive an epidemic of dangerous skin cancers. A Madison Avenue public relations firm charged them two million dollars to come up with the idea. The proposal was for them to disease-monger themselves from foolish pimple poppers into fierce cancer fighters. After this, they evangelized about patients coming to their offices to get a complete skin examination. This would supposedly prevent a plague of skin cancers. The USPSTF later exposed this idea as worthless and said the screening frenzy was cultivating lucrative skin surgery rather than preventing cancer.
Melanoma is the only skin cancer that routinely metastasizes and kills people. The dermatologists almost universally refer these cases to plastic surgeons for removal and then to oncologists for chemotherapy. Few skin doctors want to get involved with a fatal disease.
But when the dermatologists became cancer slayers, they began crying about the exploding numbers of melanomas along with the other skin tumors. As a result, they discovered so many that they made the claim that melanomas were increasing faster than any other cancer. This epidemic now seems to be on the point of slaughtering anyone who dares to walk outside in sunlight.
Left unsaid was that small, early tumors require only a simple procedure rather than an overpriced, supposedly complicated plastic surgery. Treating low-grade (thin) melanomas in seniors does not prolong their lives, either. However, once discovered, since progression into a fatal disease is unpredictable, they are cut off.
Because of all this, far more melanomas are being identified, but the total deaths are not increasing. Like thyroid and kidney cancer, the disease-specific mortality for melanoma has not gone up one iota. All the extra procedures to chase them, however, cost us time, pain, money, and anxiety.
This is incredibly enlightening. Thank you, Robert. I just learned about the overdiagnosis epidemic involved from reading The New England Journal of Medicine publication on this very subject.
It was the dermatologists:
The modern era for skin doctors started in the 1980s when the American Academy of Dermatology hatched a plan to contrive an epidemic of dangerous skin cancers. A Madison Avenue public relations firm charged them two million dollars to come up with the idea. The proposal was for them to disease-monger themselves from foolish pimple poppers into fierce cancer fighters. After this, they evangelized about patients coming to their offices to get a complete skin examination. This would supposedly prevent a plague of skin cancers. The USPSTF later exposed this idea as worthless and said the screening frenzy was cultivating lucrative skin surgery rather than preventing cancer.
Melanoma is the only skin cancer that routinely metastasizes and kills people. The dermatologists almost universally refer these cases to plastic surgeons for removal and then to oncologists for chemotherapy. Few skin doctors want to get involved with a fatal disease.
But when the dermatologists became cancer slayers, they began crying about the exploding numbers of melanomas along with the other skin tumors. As a result, they discovered so many that they made the claim that melanomas were increasing faster than any other cancer. This epidemic now seems to be on the point of slaughtering anyone who dares to walk outside in sunlight.
Left unsaid was that small, early tumors require only a simple procedure rather than an overpriced, supposedly complicated plastic surgery. Treating low-grade (thin) melanomas in seniors does not prolong their lives, either. However, once discovered, since progression into a fatal disease is unpredictable, they are cut off.
Because of all this, far more melanomas are being identified, but the total deaths are not increasing. Like thyroid and kidney cancer, the disease-specific mortality for melanoma has not gone up one iota. All the extra procedures to chase them, however, cost us time, pain, money, and anxiety.
From Butchered by "Healthcare", free download here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/4kliod8a9z
This is incredibly enlightening. Thank you, Robert. I just learned about the overdiagnosis epidemic involved from reading The New England Journal of Medicine publication on this very subject.