Cancer screening, cancer screening, cancer screening, cancer screening...

For years, that has been the relentlessly wrong public message. You can't even turn on a TV or radio without hearing some celebrity, athlete or other public figure lecture you about the supposed importance of getting screened for breast or prostate cancer.

Now, the same people who started beating that drum have finally realized they're playing the wrong tune. The American Cancer Society is revising its position on screenings, admitting that recommending them for everyone has led to over-treatment.

It's about time.

The problems with these screenings are so well-documented that only severe denial has allowed them to go on for so long... that, of course, and the rising fees collected by hospitals, clinics and doctors that do the screenings and carry out the surgeries.

You see, if cancer screenings worked, then each early treatment would be matched statistically by one fewer cancer death down the road in long-term studies.

But... whoops. That hasn't happened.

Instead, the long-term studies show just one half of that equation: A big jump in cancer treatments, but only a slight drop (if any) in cancer deaths later on.

So the American Cancer Society has finally opened its eyes and recognized the elephant in the room, and the New York Times reports that they are crafting a new policy on screening that all but admits they were wrong.

"We don't want people to panic," Dr. Otis Brawley, the organization's chief medical officer, told the New York Times. "But I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated."

Bravo to Dr. Brawley for some rare honesty... but he's a few years too late. Cancer turned into panic when everyone started getting screened and found out that, in many cases, they had cancer.

Too often, those were cancers that people have always had, but didn't know about. These cancers grow so slowly or have such a slow risk of spreading that they rarely put anyone at risk. What the patients didn't know, didn't kill them.

But now, an entire generation of men and women have had to live with the trauma and side effects of cancer diagnoses and surgeries that they never needed to begin with.

That's not a mistake. That's a shame.

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