Contentious Screening Decisions — Does the Choice Matter?

Artists often understand us better than we understand ourselves. A cartoon in the March 26 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News shows a physician who, after exhaustively reviewing the literature, offers to flip a coin to help a woman decide whether to have mammography. We suspect that this would not be an irrational approach, and we are surprised that nobody else has recommended it during the intemperate debate over whether to screen women in their 40s for breast cancer, the flip-flopping policy statements on mammography by federal agencies, and the impetuous medical pronouncements on the issue by politicians (see the . . .