I totally disagree with this statement.
The pap smear is an unreliable test that sends many healthy women for biopsies. Biopsies are not things to be taken lightly – they can leave women with psychological problems/pyschosexual issues, infertility, problems during pregnancy and cause pre-term labor. These are things that are well-documented and that is why the guidelines for pap smears have finally been revised – to contain the harm to healthy women.
Writing off these procedures as minor is hard to understand – I doubt many women would agree with you.

The really sad thing is that almost all of these biopsies are unnecessary – only a tiny number of women are actually helped by cervical screening while thousands of women go through the anguish of a false postive and unnecessary biopsies.
Women have been pushed, pressured and coerced into cervical screening, with no risk information and regardless of their risk profile, to their detriment. Doctors have always ignored the need to obtain informed consent.
The risk of this cancer has always been exaggerated and the benefits of the test over-stated…
Sure a few women are helped, but at what cost to healthy women?

That isn’t a requirement. You don’t need to be an oncologist to analyze the data.

I’m not claiming that there is no room for disagreement. There is no doubt about what the data shows, but there is doubt about how to act on it. My point, though, is that this is not some sort of plot to deny care or deny coverage. This is precisely where the scientific evidence leads.

The greatest strength of medicine is that it changes in response to new information. We have new information. The recommendations changed. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

Doc99 – there are a number of things that USPSTF has “against” recommendation e.g. EKJ for every physical, yet doctors do it all the time and insurance pays for it. In fact there was a study in NEJM a couple of years ago that showed that over 50% of annual physicals include non-recommended tests. There is absolutely no reason to think this recommendations would lead to denial of coverage. What it may lead to is more honest discussions and more people being aware that more screening is not necessarily better.

“The danger here is that this panel’s conclusions will inevitably be the rationale for denial of coverage.”

But why shouldn’t they deny coverage it doesn’t save many lives?

All screening guidelines are necessarily arbitrary. Though people claim to be concerned about dropping the recommendation for yearly mammograms in women aged 40-49, they aren’t clamoring that the recommendations should be extended to yearly mammograms for women aged 30-39? If people believe, as they claim that they do, that it is worth any amount of money to save one life, they should be insisting on screening for women aged 30-39 since breast cancer can occur in that group, too.

Moreover, there’s nothing special about whole numbers that end in 0. Why not recommend yearly screening women aged 28-39? For that matter, there’s nothing special about yearly intervals. Why aren’t they recommending screening for all women every 6 months instead of every 12 months? Surely we could save a few more lives that way, too

Unless we plan to screen all women all the time, we must make guidelines, and those guidelines will necessarily mean that some women will not have their cancer diagnosed as early as technically possible. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have guidelines. And those guidelines must be determined by what the scientific evidence shows us.