Amid the COVID-19 outbreak, many of us are taking extra precautions to make sure we stay safe and healthy. However, a recent survey suggests that one-third of Americans are missing out on important medical checkups specifically cancer screenings. Staying safe is important, but avoiding cancer screenings can lead to serious problems down the line.
According to a survey by charity Prevent Cancer Foundation, which included 1,000 participants, 35% of Americans have missed routine cancer screenings due to the fear of leaving the house during the pandemic. Additionally, 43% of Americans have missed medical appointments.
Read MoreMissing Cancer Screenings: Why It’s A Problem
It’s understandable that people want to limit their time outside of their home in order to avoid being exposed to the coronavirus, but experts say that doctors fear this means more cancers will go undiagnosed until patients feel comfortable visiting the hospital again leading to an influx of cancer diagnoses at one time.
"When we start opening the gates up and screening people again, those people will come in, [and] we're actually going to screen a lot more people in that first couple of months than we normally do," says Dr. Otis Brawley, a medical oncologist and epidemiologist at John Hopkins University. "Because we're screening more people then, we're going to diagnose more cancer. The clearing out of the prevalences is simply the people who would have been diagnosed during the period of no screening [that] are diagnosed when we start screening again.”
From The Experts: Get Screened
Due to the pandemic, hospitals and doctors have adjusted to changing guidelines and taking extra safety precautions to make sure patients aren’t at risk of contracting COVID-19, such as requiring patients to wear masks, testing everyone who enters the hospital, and sanitizing surfaces and equipment.
“It’s actually a very safe time for many hospitals because we have policies in place to screen patients and visitors prior to them coming in,” Dr. Gray explains. “So it’s really important, now that we’ve been living with COVID and we’ve adjusted our lives to COVID masking, social distancing, all of those things that now we can’t forget about the rest of our medical care. We really do need to make sure patients if they’re having symptoms, if they’re having a medical concern, that they should be coming in.”
Dr. Heidi Gray says it’s critical patients still get medical care amid COVID-19
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