Flexible sigmoidoscopy: safety and usefulness in the geriatric patient.

The flexible sigmoidoscope is clearly the best available screening tool for colorectal cancer. It is superior to rigid sigmoidoscopy in that the flexible scope can examine longer lengths of bowel and yields a larger number of pathologic findings. The majority of colon cancers lie beyond the view of the rigid scope, which detects only about 30% of all malignant lesions.