In one of our previous articles, we discussed a study of screening for prostate cancer.1 Now we’re going to move up a bit, at least anatomically, and discuss a study of screening for lung cancer.2 We have previously defined ourselves as curmudgeons and skeptics; to those self-descriptions we now add a new term, “chutzpahniks.” For those of you who may be unfamiliar with that Yiddish term, it means people who have chutzpah, which was defined by Leo Rosten3 as: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Our chutzpah stems from the fact that we are criticizing the results of a study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and highly praised in an editorial in that journal.4 If we had less chutzpah, we wouldn’t contemplate such a critique, but then again, if we had less chutzpah, we—a clinical psychologist and a nuclear physicist—wouldn’t be writing articles in a cancer journal. So, on to the study...
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