BREAST SELF EXAMINATION AND RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (“USPSTFâ€) represents an official view that medical treatment should be “evidence-based medicine”. That is there should be no treatment unless it has passed muster in a randomized controlled experiment. I posted here about the recommendation by the USPSTF against teaching breast self examination because there had been no satisfactory statistical study supporting it. (Until the Chinese eyeglass experiment there had been no statistical evidence that wearing eyeglasses was helpful to students).
It is hard to conceive of a controlled experiment relating to breast self examination so it seems unlikely that breast self examination will ever be part of “evidence-based medicine”.