Screening tests can be reassuring, but they have limitations
December 28th, 2009
A few weeks ago, a healthy patient in her early 40s came to my office requesting a CT scan of the chest. She was a smoker and wanted to be sure that she didn’t have lung cancer.
I explained to her that a CT, or computerized tomography, scan was not a good test for lung cancer. I even pulled up the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines on my computer to show her that there was no compelling evidence to support screening.