Today's paper had a story about a pathologist and a Pap lab being recommended for criminal indictment by an inquest jury for some form of homicide in the cases of two women who died of cervical cancer following reports of negative Pap smears. This apparently happened in Milwaukee or thereabouts. Paps are one of the most labor-intensive tests in laboratory medicine.
Paps are one of the cheapest tests in laboratory medicine.
Big labs use Paps as loss leaders to secure accounts which generate demand for other lab services which can be delivered with a decent profit margin. Because of ridiculous and inflated claims made over the last three decades, the public has been led to believe that a regular Pap smear will absolutely prevent cervical cancer. The people who have engendered these claims are academic cytopathologists who are now dead, retired, tenured, or in the employment of plaintiffs' lawyers. In other words, they can no longer be held accountable for their actions. The physicians who collect the Pap smear range in ability from those who know what they are doing to those who couldn't tell a cervix uteri from a bicuspid aortic valve.