Cancer – Shared Decision Making

Transcript

At your annual physical, you should talk to your doctor about what screening tests for cancer might be appropriate for you. This is a process called shared decision-making and it’s absolutely essential. Gone are the days when your doctor tells you what to do, and without objection, you do it. We want the process to be a back and forth discussion between the doctor and the patient. Why is it so important? At any particular age, some screening tests are appropriate and some aren’t. Over a certain age, some screening tests may no longer be recommended. It’s not that we’ve decided to write a patient off because of advancing age, but at a certain point for some cancers, the harms might outweigh the benefits of screening. And you might ask, what are the harms of screening? Isn’t knowing about a cancer always better than not knowing? No. There can be significant harms from cancer screening. And this is why shared decision making is so important. Just for example, if a screening test suggests that you need a biopsy, you might have excessive bleeding from the biopsy that requires another procedure to stop the bleeding, or you might develop an infection from a biopsy procedure looking to identify a cancer, for example, that might not have ever harmed you in your lifetime. So this is really an individual decision of weighing the risks and benefits to decide between you and your doctor, whether screening for a particular cancer is right for you.