By GINA KOLATA
Gastroenterologists are worried about their future. The problem, as some of them see it, is that they have become so dependent on using colonoscopy to screen for cancer that many do little else. But the advent of new methods of detecting colon cancer could shove them out of the screening business.
If that happens, what will gastroenterologists do? A committee of the American Gastroenterological Association says it is time to think about this possibility.
It would not be the first time that the profession has had to change.
A decade or so ago, gastroenterologists spent much of their time putting scopes down patients’ throats and into their stomachs to look for ulcers. But over the last 20 years, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes most ulcers, began to disappear in this country. Patients with chronic ulcers became less and less common.
Source http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/health/14pros.html
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