Even though he had gotten a “ningen dock” (Japan’s comprehensive health screening) every year, his colorectal cancer wasn’t found until stage 4, by which point surgery was no longer an option — this survivor’s story was reported and became a hot topic on 5ch. The blame centered on the fecal occult blood test commonly used in these screenings, which tends to miss lesions that aren’t actively bleeding. The thread saw both claims that “a colonoscopy would have caught it” and defenses that “the fecal occult blood test alone just has its limits,” and the debate spread into differences in screening content, checkup rates, and the high cost of more thorough tests.
[Battling Illness] Despite Annual Health Screenings, ‘Colorectal Cancer’ Stage 4 — “There’s No Way to Operate”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
Honestly, given how easy it is to miss something, even once every three months would be reasonable
If anything, blame heaven
My workplace does blood tests and stool tests every six months
It says once a year
That's expensive
Source: me
Only 3 months? What kind of stress causes that…
Is the risk really a flat 0%?
colorectal cancer specifically seems to be caused by toxins produced by gut microbes
and apparently a lot of Japanese people happen to carry these microbes
New-employee health checkup in April
Getting home at 1am every night
One day my back started aching and I couldn't stop coughing at night, so I was chugging cough syrup
Six-month follow-up checkup in October
They told me to push it back since things were busy, but I pushed through and went anyway
Found a huge tumor in my lung
→ Hospitalized the next day
After 3 rounds of chemo, had open-chest surgery down the center of my sternum
So what happened after that — how are you doing now?
That right there is exactly the problem
I just went in for an X-ray at a hospital I hadn't visited in over 10 years, and since nobody said anything about it I let it go — my old chart isn't even on file anymore
But now every time I see a doctor, they ask about the surgical scar and the clip visible on my chest X-ray
or just doing a barium swallow and a stool test
Is there even a real definition for it?
You should get a PET scan instead
> But since I wasn't bleeding at all, the fecal occult blood test couldn't catch it. To improve your odds of catching it early, I'd also recommend a blood tumor-marker test and a colonoscopy (*).
Guess you really do need regular scope exams after all
Background and Key Points of the Debate
A “ningen dock” (comprehensive health screening) isn’t a legally standardized program — what gets tested varies a lot depending on the facility and the course you pick. The fecal occult blood test, widely used as the first-line check for colorectal cancer, tends to come back negative for lesions that aren’t bleeding — the article quoted in the thread itself says the cancer “wasn’t found because I wasn’t bleeding at all.” The thread cited a figure showing only just over 30% of people in their 40s to 60s have ever had a colonoscopy, and the hassle of laxative prep plus the extra tens of thousands of yen for a combined upper/lower endoscopy help explain that low uptake. A common misconception is the assumption itself that “getting a health screening every year prevents colorectal cancer” — in reality, whether a course centers on the fecal occult blood test or includes a full colonoscopy changes what kinds of lesions can actually be caught. Opinions in the thread split between those pointing out the tests’ inherent limits and those questioning the choice not to get a colonoscopy in the first place.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Colorectal Cancer Despite Annual Health Screenings — Whose Fault Is It?.”
