If organized radiology has been slow to address the ethics of whole-body CT screening, history has granted at least one airtight excuse.
The ACR had planned a special session at its 2001 annual meeting in September in San Francisco, featuring presentations by Dr. Harvey Eisenberg, the controversial Southern California radiologist who has pushed whole-body scans on the Oprah Winfrey TV show and in USA Today; and by Dr. Craig Bittner, who operates the AmeriScan retail imaging center next door to Nieman Marcus in an upscale Scottsdale, AZ, mall.
Unfortunately, the presentation was scheduled for September 11. It was canceled following the day's terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC.
The good news is that the RSNA will pick up where ACR left off, with a 90-minute special-focus session at next week's meeting, sponsored by the RSNA's ethics committee.
Titled "Ethical Issues in Screening for Cancer," the session's stated objectives will be "to understand the potential benefits and harms of screening, to understand the biases that can affect our estimation of these benefits and harms, to understand the concept of informed decision-making and why it is particularly relevant to screening, and to understand how (these) pertain to screening for lung cancer with helical CT."
The RSNA session will be led by Dr. William Black, a radiologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, who is a lung cancer screening investigator. It will be held Monday, November 26, 2001, 4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m., Room E451A at McCormick Place.
Black said he would touch on the ethical issue of screening tests being available only to people who can afford them, but he doesn’t see that as a big issue. A larger issue, he believes, is the likelihood that screening tests could lead to far more invasive procedures to diagnose suspected abnormalities.
"You get on this treadmill where you find more and more abnormalities, and eventually you have to do something pretty invasive," Black said.
Capping RSNA week will be another session on the topic, "Screening for Cancer," to be held Friday, November 30, 2001, 12:45 p.m.- 3:15 p.m., in the Arie Crown Theater.
By Robert BruceAuntMinnie.com contributing writer
November 23, 2001
Related Reading
For the person who has everything, whole-body CT makes inroads, September 11, 2001
New ARRS president cautions against turning ‘healthy people into sick people’, April 30, 2001
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