"colonoscopies reduce the death rate from colon cancer by a whopping 53%"
Do they? I'm not saying we shouldn't have colonoscopies, however:
"The new study did not compare colonoscopy with other ways of screening for colorectal cancer and so does not fully resolve a long-standing medical debate about which method is best. "
However, in another study reported in the same New England Journal of Medicine, as reported in the
Washington Post:
"About 53,000 participants were given a colonoscopy or a stool blood test.
Both tests found similar numbers of colon cancer cases — about 30 in each group."
So .001 percent of 53,000 had cancer, and the stool blood test worked as well as the colonoscopy. Personally, the blood stool test seems like the one I want to take in the future. However, the colonoscopy was magnitudes better at finding growths in the intestine - they just weren't necessarily cancerous growths.
Also from the Washington Post:
"The study was not a randomized trial that’s the gold standard in medical research."
And there's this, from the NYT article:
Dr. Harold C. Sox, an emeritus professor of medicine at Dartmouth Medical School and former editor of a leading medical journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, said that because all of the patients in the study had adenomatous polyps, it is not certain that the findings would apply exactly to the general population.
In fact, the type of polyp researched in the study is only found in about 15 percent of women and 25 percent of men.
Dr. Sox also said, "the people with polyps were part of a study that provided high-quality colonoscopy, so they may not have been comparable to the general population."
Sox does think, though, that removing polyps will lower mortality rates.
And there was this:
"certain types of polyps are hard to detect and...colonoscopy is better at finding polyps in the lower part of the intestine than in its upper reaches."
So a colonoscopy is better than no test. However, it won't guarantee that we won't get or don't already have colon cancer, it may be no better than the stool sample test, and the results of this study may not pertain to the general population.