Why South Korea Stopped Cutting Necks for Tiny Cancer Lumps
South Korea's Thyroid-Cancer "Epidemic"--Turning the Tide.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Doctors found lots of tiny, harmless thyroid lumps in healthy people using ultrasounds and cut them out — but it didn’t save lives. When the public learned these lumps were usually harmless, fewer people got surgery.
Surprising Findings
Thyroid cancer deaths didn’t change despite a 15-fold increase in diagnoses.
Everyone assumes more cancer detection = fewer deaths. This study proves that’s not true when you’re finding harmless tumors—challenging the core logic of population-wide screening.
Practical Takeaways
If you’re offered a thyroid ultrasound as part of a ‘wellness check,’ ask: ‘Is this likely to find a cancer that could kill me—or just a harmless lump that will lead to surgery?’
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a healthcare professional. Terms
Doctors found lots of tiny, harmless thyroid lumps in healthy people using ultrasounds and cut them out — but it didn’t save lives. When the public learned these lumps were usually harmless, fewer people got surgery.
Surprising Findings
Thyroid cancer deaths didn’t change despite a 15-fold increase in diagnoses.
Everyone assumes more cancer detection = fewer deaths. This study proves that’s not true when you’re finding harmless tumors—challenging the core logic of population-wide screening.
Practical Takeaways
If you’re offered a thyroid ultrasound as part of a ‘wellness check,’ ask: ‘Is this likely to find a cancer that could kill me—or just a harmless lump that will lead to surgery?’
Publication
Journal
The New England journal of medicine
Year
2015
Authors
H. Ahn, H. Welch
Related Content
Claims (5)
In South Korea, more people are being told they have thyroid cancer than before, but not fewer people are dying from it — which means many of those new diagnoses might be for cancers that wouldn’t have hurt them anyway.
In 2015, South Korea decided not to routinely scan healthy people’s necks with ultrasound to check for thyroid cancer, because they thought it wasn’t helpful for most people.
In South Korea, more people were diagnosed with thyroid cancer between 1993 and 2011—not because more people were getting sick, but because doctors started using ultrasound scans to check everyone’s necks, even if they felt fine, and found lots of tiny, harmless tumors that would never have caused problems.
After South Korea ran public campaigns about thyroid cancer in 2014, a lot fewer people got surgery for it—down by about a third in just one year. This makes people think that talking more about overdiagnosis might help stop unnecessary surgeries.
In South Korea, many people and doctors didn’t want to stop checking for thyroid cancer so often, even when it might not be needed—some even said it was a right everyone should have, suggesting that money and institutions might be pushing unnecessary tests.