Continuing with the medical news theme today, MSNBC has published an AP report of a finding that doctors who spent less than six minutes on the crucial part of a colonoscopy found four times fewer precancerous polyps than those who spent at least six minutes with the scope. From the article:
Most doctors are probably not tracking how long they take or how many growths they find, said Dr. Douglas Rex, chief of endoscopy at Indiana University and a spokesman for the American College of Gastroenterology.
“It’s a reasonable thing for people to start asking their doctor,” he recommended. “Say: 'I want you to be really careful and slow in examining my colon.”’
Colonoscopy is the gold standard test to screen for colon cancer, which will strike nearly 150,000 Americans this year and kill more than 55,000.
Tell your doctor to take his time during your next colonoscopy. Those who spent less than the recommended six minutes on the crucial part of the exam found four times fewer precancerous growths than those who lingered longer with the scope, a study found.
It involved thousands of exams done by 12 doctors in a large private gastroenterology practice in Rockford, Ill. Doctors who spent the most time found 10 times more growths than those who zipped fastest through the procedure, said Dr. Robert Barclay, who led the study and published results in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
“We were surprised at the magnitude of the differences among the colonoscopists in our group,” he said.
Given that patients undergoing colonoscopies are usually sedated, I don't know how you can be sure that the doctor who is doing your exam is taking his/her time in the key part of the exam and being thorough. I suppose that the best you can do is to rely on reputation and observations of whether the doctor seems generally thorough and deliberate. And if you ask the doctor to take his/her time and be thorough and you get a brush-off, it might be worth finding another doctor.
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