Just mention the word colonoscopy and people start to cringe. Anyone who has undergone the procedure can tell you that the colonoscopy itself is not difficult — most people don’t remember a thing — but the prep is another story. So, here are some suggestions to help you glide through it.

This column is not intended to be a definitive guide to the understanding of cervical cancer. My intention is to remind women that with diligent screening and an understanding of the cause and risk factors, cervical cancer is sometimes preventable.

There’s a long and discouraging list of known risk factors for breast cancer. They range from early periods and late childbirth to lack of exercise, high-fat diets and alcohol consumption. Genetics and age also play a role in predicting the risk. But the most damning risk factor of all, of course, is simply being a woman.

It’s a tough enough life when every choice you make appears to increase your chances of getting the disease. But no woman expects that the very screening tool used to identify breast cancer should increase her lifetime risk. Yet last June, the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health released its Eleventh Report on Carcinogens in which ionizing radiation, including the 15 percent that occurs during medical procedures, was identified as a known human carcinogen. This revelation, alongside the well-documented shortcomings of mammography, outlined in a previous column, has reignited a public cry for research into alternative and less invasive breast cancer screening options.

I’ve got used to being right, and to no one paying the blindest bit of attention. But rarely have I been proven right in such a short space of time. I have long questioned the value of screening for various diseases. Primarily, I suppose, because we don’t really know how diseases progress — especially cancer. Secondly, because it costs billions of dollars. Thirdly, it creates a great deal of worry and anxiety. Fourthly…. Well, that’s enough reasons for now.

Some time ago, I was looking through the latest definitions of various states of health. I can’t remember why. I think I was writing a paper on multiple sclerosis and trying to establish the various stages that you may progress through, from fully fit and able to bed bound and incapable of feeding yourself.

All types of health “states” were catalogued for all sorts of diseases. However, the really depressing definition was left to last. Someone with no disease or disability of any sort — the type of person you or I might call “healthy” — was defined as temporarily able. As if health is a strange abnormal state, which, happily, given a bit of time, will revert to the more normal human condition of illness.

The most devastating loss of life from breast cancer impacts women between the ages of 30 and 50. For women between the ages of 40 and 44, breast cancer is the leading cause of death, according to the American Cancer Society. Yet the November 10, 2003 issue of the AMA journal, American Medical News, reports little evidence documenting that mammography saves lives from breast cancer for premenopausal women, which are many of the women who fall into these age ranges.

Concerns About The Accuracy Of X-Ray Readings

When you get a medical or dental X-ray, do you automatically believe what your doctor, dentist, or radiologist tells you about what it reveals? I always have. During my life, I’ve had X-rays taken of my foot, knee, back, chest, lungs, finger, and, of course, teeth, on many occasions. And every time I have been given results, I have accepted them as accurate, trustworthy, reliable, and true, with nary more than a raised eyebrow when the finding was hard to accept, based on my own feelings about my condition.

While reasoning out why I’m getting a colonoscopy next week, I found myself thinking about the odds of getting hit by a bolt of lightning - and how I and most everyone else react to that possibility. Only a few people ever get hit by those “bolts from the blue,” of course, but most everyone tries to avoid them, by staying indoors. Why? Because though the odds a given person will be hit are almost zero, the consequences of that outcome are so grave almost no one seems to care about the odds of getting hit - only the possibility that it could happen to oneself.