How much does disease screening cost?

The cost of disease screening spans a very wide range, ranging from free public health projects to in-depth customized screening worth tens of thousands of yuan. There is no unified pricing, and it completely changes with the screening direction, project portfolio and institutional attributes.

For example, the community health service center organizes basic disease screenings for the elderly in the area every year, including blood pressure, blood sugar, blood routine, and urine routine, plus a general chest X-ray. In many areas, people's welfare directly exempts them from the bill. If you really have to pay for it at your own expense, it will not exceed 100 yuan. The basic disease screening we usually require for employment and admission, to check for common infectious diseases and basic organ abnormalities, can be done with only two to three hundred.

If there are clear high-risk factors for the disease, the cost will go up if targeted programs are added. Last month, I accompanied a friend with a family history of lung cancer to the respiratory department to get a screening test. The doctor asked him to do a low-dose spiral CT plus lung cancer-related tumor markers every year. The cost of a set is less than 800, which is more accurate than the more than 2000 "special lung cancer screening package" he had seen in a private institution before, and all the redundant and useless items were eliminated.

Nowadays, many institutions advocate that "the more expensive the screening, the more comprehensive it is." Many people are willing to spend thousands or even tens of thousands for full-body screening including PET-CT and whole-gene sequencing. This is actually quite controversial in clinical practice. Many clinicians have made it clear that there is no need for ordinary healthy people without high-risk factors to undergo such high-priced screenings. Firstly, the radiation dose of PET-CT is not small. Secondly, the test results of many gene loci have no clinical significance at all. Instead, some ambiguous abnormalities are found, which makes me anxious for months. However, there are also some people who have a family history of cancer and are exposed to high-risk disease factors all year round. They feel that spending this money can detect very early cancers earlier, and it is worth spending even more.

My community recently organized two cancer screenings for women of appropriate age. My mother went with the neighbor aunties. The full set of cervical cancer and breast cancer screenings were free. If you go to the hospital to do this at your own expense, it only costs more than 200 yuan. There is no need to buy the "female-specific cancer screening" that private institutions sell for thousands of dollars. If you really want to do disease screening, don’t look at the price first. First, ask a doctor to evaluate the high-risk risks corresponding to your age, family history, and daily habits. It is most cost-effective to choose items based on your needs. After all, we do screening to prevent diseases, not to buy "comprehensive" psychological comfort, right?