We often speak of prevention - 360 degree prevention - from all diseases, but massive advertising campaigns specially focus on oncology and its sectors, which chiefly concern women, to be precise gynaecology and senology.
The warning concerning the impossibility to practically provide “qualified prevention” was given by Dr. Loredana Maspes, National Cancer Institute of Milan (La Repubblica, 12 July 2005), who rightly said: “The delay in the list of patients awaiting prevention tests requires us to double the senology centre, subsequently strengthening the unit with qualified personnel and appropriate financial means.”
We cannot fail to agree with Dr. Maspes’ words and we must also take note that the problem has no short term solution.
Training medical staff qualified to professionally make preventive diagnoses is neither simple nor quick work.
The percentage of patients who suffer disastrous consequences in the short term, despite having closely followed the prevention path with diagnoses that everything is all right and that everything is normal, has currently increased.
Prevention is an appropriate measure only if it is skilled. And, if the situation were such, Dr. Maspes would not be forced to choose between prevention and treatment.
Extensive information campaigns on prevention are anachronistic when we are unable to provide an adequate service; it is like advertising a consumer product, which is not distributed by retail outlets. Just like the Ministry of Health’s untimely law against smoke, when the state sells the cigarettes. Wouldn’t it have been an ethically better move to first privatize State Monopoly? Is it a politically sceptic perspective? No, it is not. To put it simply we need to get a point straight in an issue dedicated to cancer research.
Genina Iacobone
Direttore di Leadership Medica
