Lewisia cotyledon regenboog.

I’m a tad late posting my flower Friday challenge hosted, as ever, by BikerBear to whom thanks are due. I must admit to having been rather busy for the last 48 hours, in part, because I downloaded Margaret McCartney’s Kindle book after mentioning it in yesterday’s Blip. It makes scary reading. I must admit to knowing what to expect and knew many of the facts that she quotes already. Seeing the statistics written down, complete with formal references, somehow puts them into stark perspective.
 
The year that I was born, to answer questions that were asked yesterday, 1944, was, as near as dammit, the year that doctors started to cure more patients than they killed – allegedly. I might be wrong, but I think McCartney might disagree. Let’s take my bowel screening as a case in point: the test simply looks for blood in your stool. First remember that, by definition, there is apparently nothing wrong with me, I have no symptoms, I appear to be healthy; if it were otherwise the procedure would be an investigation - not screening. There are many reasons why blood could be there – including having eaten red meat the day before. Are you beginning to worry? Out of every 625 people tested, 12.5 will test positive although only one person will actually have the cancer. That means that to find the one person with cancer, 12.5 people will have to have a probe stuck up their bottom to remove a sample of tissue for further investigation. This procedure can cause serious bleeding, a perforated bowel or, even death - not to mention the worry, stress and discomfort. To be of any value at all, the above procedure must be able to lead to a treatment that will delay death without reducing the quality of life. There is no value in screening if it is going to show that I am dying of bowel cancer; equally, there is no value in surgery that successfully removes all the cancerous tissue if I then die a couple of days later in the recovery room of a surgically induced heart attack or stroke – no surgical procedure is safe. The crude statistics for a man of my age are that, if I don’t undergo the screening, I have a 0.7% chance of dying on bowel cancer in the next 10 years, if I take the test that figure goes down to 0.6%. Not a lot, unless I happen to be in that 0.1% difference. There is still a catch though; the numbers are not the “whole life risk.” What if I die of a condition related to the treatment? The important numbers compare my chances of dying, from any cause, if I do the screening with my chances of dying from any cause it I don’t. Those statistics are, of course, not available.
 
So, will I be taking the test? Answers on a post card please (as they used to say) to The Bowel Cancer Screening Clinic, address available on line.