Doctors express concern about professional medical societies setting treatment and screening policies

September 9, 2010

The firestorm that erupted over the USPSTF mammography screening recommendations released in 2009, and the lessons that can be learned about the impact of special interest professional medical societies, is discussed in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.  Advocates of breast-cancer screening, particularly breast radiologists, reacted immediately to the new recommendations by denouncing the panel’s statements as government rationing, suggesting that the panel members had ignored the medical evidence, and even implying that the panel members were guilty of a callous disregard for the life and well-being of women, say the authors.

"In any other industry, we accept the idea as natural that those providing a service or product hold their own and their shareholders’ interests as a primary objective. Why have we failed to acknowledge that the same phenomenon occurs in health care?" the authors ask.

"It is for this reason that some degree of market regulation is necessary, such as truth-in-advertising and antitrust laws. It is only in health care that we have failed to recognize the need for analogous protections. It is only in health care, after all, that the same group that provides a service also tells us how valuable that service is and how much of it we need, as when the Society of Breast Imaging sets the recommendations for mammography," the authors say.