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by Dr. Elizabeth Poynor
Last week was a perfect storm for women’s healthcare as we know it, and many are questioning whether these changes would, in fact, be detrimental to women. Just as the debate on health care reform was beginning to heat up in the Senate, we learned from two independent agencies about radical changes in how and when two of the most effective screening tests for women may be provided. Most health care providers who specialize in women’s health have never experienced this kind of change in preventive care recommendations, and we are reeling from these new “guidelines” that have been delivered to the media at the same time and over a five-day period.
I have taken time to examine these new recommendations and discuss them with my colleagues, many of whom have serious concerns about these changes and how they may significantly affect women’s health care overall. These two protocols for women’s cancer screening — mammograms and Pap smears — have been credited as two of our greatest triumphs, leading to lower cancer death rates for both breast and cervical cancer. With cervical cancer, the story appeared pretty straightforward: In the United States, the cervical cancer death rate declined by 65 percent between 1955 and 1992, in large part due to the effectiveness of Pap smear screening. The death rate continues to decline each year.
