At the behest of my wife, who mentioned that my bowel habits had changed recently (for the better in my opinion!) I bought a DIY fecal occult blood test kit. It detects hidden ("occult") blood in excrement, which is an indicator of several nasty conditions; particularly colorectal cancer.
(If I lived in Scotland I'd have been sent something similar by the NHS on my fiftieth birthday. We English have to wait until we are 60. Are we really more robust? Or just poorer...)
Although I was confident that I had no bowel problem, I must admit to discovering that I'd been holding my breath until the test kit confirmed the fact.
Showing posts with label prevention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prevention. Show all posts
23 April 2011
16 April 2011
Preventative Medicine: the economics
One of the most important factors to living indefinitely is detecting disease early. This is especially true for cancer and cardiovascular disorders. So why don't national health services and insurance companies insist on annual checkups for everyone?
One reason is cost.
Let's say there's a disease that 1 in 100,000 people will suffer from each year. Treating that disease when symptoms have appeared costs £10,000. Treating it early costs only £100. A reliable test for the disease costs a mere £1. Testing everyone annually will therefore cost £100,000, saving one person's direct suffering and £9,900 in treatment costs.
The decision an insurance company would make is obvious: don't do the testing. Governments however have a more complex choice: performing tests will keep people in work and paying taxes rather than claiming benefits, for example. Nonetheless it would be a brave administration that spent so much for the benefit of so few.
Would I personally spend £1 a year to make sure I'm not one of those few? Of course I would.
Currently, real blood urine and saliva tests cost a lot more than £1. In a decade or two there will be lab's-on-a-chip costing mere pennies; but until that time, the stark reality is that it's up to each of us to individually decide how much to invest in finding out how healthy, or not, we are.
One reason is cost.
Let's say there's a disease that 1 in 100,000 people will suffer from each year. Treating that disease when symptoms have appeared costs £10,000. Treating it early costs only £100. A reliable test for the disease costs a mere £1. Testing everyone annually will therefore cost £100,000, saving one person's direct suffering and £9,900 in treatment costs.
The decision an insurance company would make is obvious: don't do the testing. Governments however have a more complex choice: performing tests will keep people in work and paying taxes rather than claiming benefits, for example. Nonetheless it would be a brave administration that spent so much for the benefit of so few.
Would I personally spend £1 a year to make sure I'm not one of those few? Of course I would.
Currently, real blood urine and saliva tests cost a lot more than £1. In a decade or two there will be lab's-on-a-chip costing mere pennies; but until that time, the stark reality is that it's up to each of us to individually decide how much to invest in finding out how healthy, or not, we are.
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