For every thousand women who undergo annual ultrasound exams for ovarian cancer, 6 are correctly diagnosed with the disease, compared with 5 in a thousand unscreened women—and the number of deaths in the two groups is the same, 3. So much for the benefits. What about the costs? Out of the thousand who are screened, another 94 get terrifying false alarms, 31 of whom suffer unnecessary removal of their ovaries, of whom 5 have serious complications to boot. The number of false alarms and unnecessary surgeries among women who are not screened, of course, is zero. It doesn’t take a lot of math to
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