Breast Cancer Screening and Prevention: Health Screening and Prevention

Preface

This book is about breast cancer screening. It was conceived after years of experience practicing medicine. My clinical interactions with patients, nurses, doctors, and medical personnel helped me recognize a need for a concise and informative treatise on disease screening and prevention for the general public. This is because the information on screening is not readily available. The vast majority of citizens in our society have no knowledge what disease prevention guidelines have to offer them. Most patients have only a vague, and often an inaccurate knowledge of preventive medicine. Their knowledge, for example, on when to stop breast cancer screening is frequently poor.

This book was designed to rectify the gap in knowledge between the public and the medical community. In this era of steeply rising health care costs, the most effective way for our society to curb costs is to assure that its citizens undergo diligent and careful screening tests. The ultimate benefit of disease screening and early prevention is to the patients themselves. It is very important for everyone to understand that disease must be caught in the early stages. Colon and breast cancer if discovered too late, results in death within three to four years. Both colon and breast cancer caught early results in significantly improved survival, and probably near-normal life expectancy.

In order to help the general public understand the concepts of medicine, many complicated issues and definitions have been simplified in this book. This is to allow those with little knowledge of preventive medicine and screening to understand the principles of basic health care. To medically educated individuals, these may appear to reflect inaccuracies, however, the concepts are intentionally simplified to allow the general public to understand the basic concepts. An example is the concept of sensitivity and specificity of diseases. These two words have been reduced in this book to mean accuracy so that the general public will