Screening Strikes Back

Last episode, we sat down with Dr. TR Levin — the gastroenterologist who built one of the most effective colon cancer screening programs in the country — and worked through why screening is so much harder to understand than it looks.

Some tests find things that would never have hurt you. A simple test sent to your home may work better as a screening program than a more invasive procedure, mostly because people actually do it.

And we talked about how knowing more is not always better, and sometimes no test is the best test.

A lot of you came back with the same question: fine, but what am I supposed to actually do?

In this follow-up, we talk about how to think more clearly about screening: what questions to ask, how to think about your own risk, and how to tell the difference between a test that is worth your time and one that is mostly worth someone else’s money.