If you want proper cancer screening, book an early morning appointment, new research suggests.
Patients were as much as 37 percent more likely to be screened for cancer if they had an 8am appointment than if they had one at 5pm, according to a new University of Pennsylvania.
Fatigue, backlogs and running behind schedule amount to chronic problems of the healthcare industry.
The researchers think that doctors get tired, in particular, of making important decisions over and over throughout the day.
And the compounding effects could be putting patients' lives at risk, if worn out doctors are running out of energy to check patients for cancer by the end of the day.
Doctors spend their entire days making choices that could have very real impacts on patients' lives - and by the end of the day, they're tired of it, which explain why they are less likely to order cancer screenings for 5pm patients than they are for 8am patients, a study found
Screening is the first line of defense against cancer.
We can do everything in our power to live healthy lifestyles to reduce our cancer risks, but at the end of the day, sometimes cells will simply go awry.
And not all cancer is obviously detectable to the untrained eye, so proper screening is the best shot we have to catch cancer early, when it is most isolated and treatable.
Whether or not a patient needs to be screened for colon or breast cancer - and most types - depends on their age, medical and family histories and risk factors (both genetic and lifestyle).
But doctors may have another consideration in mind.
University of Pennsylvania researchers analyzed data on about 52,000 patients who were eligible for cancer screening and had appointments with their primary care
