Challenge the screening dogma

■ Ms Menzies’s article (‘If cancer controversy sees uptake of testing decline, then the crisis will have become a total tragedy’, Irish Independent, August 4) is a sadly superficial contribution from a bioethicist on the subject of our national cancer screening programmes.

Initially I was encouraged by her useful identification of the confusion between a screening test and a clinical diagnosis. On the other hand, she then stops short of any sort of meaningful reflection on the science and ethics of cervical and breast cancer screening.

She appears to be ignorant of the fact that many practicing physicians discourage our ordinary-risk female patients from having cervical cytology or mammography or are at least ambivalent about our endorsement of a screening service, which she espouses with such unthinking enthusiasm.

It’s time our bioethicists stood up for women and challenged the politically correct dogma that female cancer screening is the right way to tackle female cancer.

As technology stands today it is not. Doctors have known this for decades.

Vicky Phelan knows it now. Surely Ms Menzies could have been more searching in her contribution so that fewer people are disappointed in the years to come.

Niall Maguire GP Navan, Co Meath