What is really frustrating about the Consumer Reports recommendation to skip oral cancer screening tests is it's stated basis; [quote]Who needs it: Most people don't need the test unless they are at high risk, because the cancer is relatively uncommon.[/quote] Why would they say that Oral cancer is just not common enough to worry about.? Because when 99% of cancer deaths are not oral cancer related and 97% of new cancers are not oral cancer, we remain a forgotten minority. The ACS 2013 cancer figure projections are 41,380 cases of oral cancer out of 1,660,290 cancer cases or less than 3%. Yet they recommend oral screening in their 2013 facts and figures
For deaths in 2013, 7,890 out of 580,350 or a little more than 1%. ACS- 2013 Cancer facts and figures
worse, all the news reports and interviews published with the doctors responsible for this bad advice all stress that Consumer Reports relied primarily upon the USPSTF reports. Yet the actual report on oral cancer screening was: T[quote]he U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) concludes that the evidence is insufficient to recommend for or against routinely screening adults for oral cancer.[/quote] Plus the USPSTF report is now over nine years old, released in February 2004. This fact is hidden by simply repeating the old 2004 analysis in the "new" 2012 guide. True if you read closely you can see [quote]The 2012 guide covers USPSTF recommendations from 2004 through March 2012, [/quote] It's misleading to say these are 2012 USPSTF recommendations. Worse, when you go to the USPSTF web site to read the report, you see that there is an "update" file on "evidence". Turns out that this update is even older and is based entirely on The search strategy for this brief update included
[quote]a MEDLINE review for English-language articles
published between 1994 and 2001 on new direct
evidence on the benefits and harms of screening and
treatment for oral cancer[/quote]
USPSTF oral cancer

And it gets worse: the "rationale" for the USPSTF sitting on the fence is
Rationale: [quote]The USPSTF found no new good-quality evidence that screening for oral cancer leads to improved health outcomes for either high-risk adults (i.e., those over the age of 50 who use tobacco) or for average-risk adults in the general population. It is unlikely that controlled trials of screening for oral cancer will ever be conducted in the general population because of the very low incidence of oral cancer in the United States. There is also no new evidence for the harms of screening. As a result, the USPSTF could not determine the balance between benefits and harms of screening for oral cancer.[/quote]
so it's a Catch 22:
So it turns out that Consumer Reports is just as unreliable as Dr. Google on oral cancer.
But then we long time subscribers have watch Consumer Reports degenerate into a primarily car buying and car review operation with outdated reviews and model listings not sold in a year for all other areas..so now they deceive by omission by falsely implying that the USPSTF supports their analysis when it fact it does not.
Charm