Too Many Breast Cancers Diagnosed by Mammograms?

X Rays/Radiation Are Never a Good Thing

A $4 billion dollar a year business (mammograms) is likely to stay around for a while. You can develop cancer in any part of your body - why focus on the breasts? I would think that if you start with mammos at age 40 and live till your 80 (40 xrays of your chest CAN'T be a good thing). Studies on the accuracy and harm of this test should be more publicized but sentence #1 clears it all up!

do I need a yearly mammogram?

I'm 38 and I'm exactly in the same dilema the article talks about. I had a benign tumor removed from my right breast 3 years ago, needless to say I was very scare by the whole ordeal. My doctor recommended me to be taking a yearly mammogram, which I've done since then and without thinking too much about it, but frankly, this year I don't feel like going through it, I feel fine, but there's is a little nagging voice inside me that tells me that I would feel very guilty if later in life I'm diagnosed with something that could be treated now, so what to do?, to do the mammogram or not do the mammogram?, that's the question I don't have an answer for.

Informed consent

It's about time that accurate information about screening mammography is provided to every woman who is considering having it done. A great source is www.screening.dk

Right now, every promoter of screening mammography - doctors, the American Cancer Society, Susan Komen etc. only mention the benefits. Risks like overtreatment (surgery, radiation, chemo), an increase in mastectomies (YES, an increase, not decrease), unnecessary biopsies, and personal consequences (unemployment, inability to get health insurance, labeling of daughters and other female relatives as high risk, increased divorce rate) are literally never mentioned. How dishonest and unfair. Women are led like lambs to the slaughter - we need the full story to make our own decisions.

And please, anyone who has been treated for cancer found by mammogram - realize that there is a good chance that you never needed treatment in the first place. Doctors tell every such patient how lucky they are, but that doesn't mean it's true.

mammogram sceening

Last year in July, at age 61, exactly one year after a previous screening mammagram which was completely normal, I went for a mammagram. Doing so likely saved my life, as a malignant tumor was found within a centimeter of my chest wall, directly back from the nipple. Because of the location of the tumor, it had not been detected by manual examination at my gynecologist's the same month, and would have had to grow very substantially before becoming large enough to be detected by hand. Now, unless the tumor, left alone, would have miraculously shrunk to nothing or had grown directly toward the nipple only, it almost certainly would have penetrated the chest wall and involved the lung--a very sad scenario and much more difficult to treat.

As it was, the tumor had not spread, and I was able to have breast conserving surgery, from which I recovered very quickly,followed by radiation, which caused no side effects other than some fatigue. From diagnosis to end of treatment was only three and a half months, and I felt 100% recovered after another month.

Needless to say, I urge my women friends and family members to have mammagrams, and to have them on time.

Screening procedures

There is a long list of screening procedures which have been promoted by the government: Mammography, PSA levels, screening chest x-rays for lung cancer, stools for occult blood for colon cancer, and Pap smears.

The only one of that crowd which seems to have been an effective screen is the Pap smear.

The rest are an expensive exercise in busy work. All--except the Pap smear--are looking at smoke in order to see the fire, and it turns out that there is a lot of smoke produced by a lot of small unimportant fires. Unfortunately, the important fires don't make any more smoke than the uniportant fires.

As a radiologist, I made a decision in 1980 not to read mammograms because I suspected it to be a dupicituous exam, I feel vindicated that I did not participate in that charade. But I have had to answer emotionally charged questions asked by hundreds of women about why they were put through so much trauma, endured so many unnecessary biopsies, and suffered so much fear from inconsiderately being told they "had cancer" when they didn't. All this in the name of science and medicine, and for that I have no answer. Thank God I have never had to participate in a discusion about someone being unnecessarily treated for cancer...

If mammography was worthwhile, the incidence of cancer deaths would have declined and survival rates should have increased during the last thirty years. The excuse that mammography is a poor tool, but the only one we have; seems pretty thin.

Breast Cancer

I won't knock Mammograms. They have strong value for women. But chemotherapy?..I would try to find any other treatment -certainly not chemotherapy ever again. And really check out your oncologist. When heart damage was detected as a result of chemotherapy, my oncologist muttered that the heart will probably heal itself. NOT TRUE!At the time the damage was detected, the chemical make-up of the chemo was changed. I had a bad reaction to that treatment. My oncologist continued to attempt to talk me into taking that same chemical combination again. I found another oncologist, because I truly felt, and still do, that another treatment would kill me. Prosthesis'should also be very light weight. The two different ones I tried caused more discomfort than going without a bra. I now use foam forms and do not get discomfort. No thanks to the professionals who sell this stuff to you. I am six years cancer free, but cancer is in the family and so bears watching closely. However, I am alive now, and do pretty much whatever I feel like doing, keeping in mind that at almost seventy, I do have limits. I just feel there have to be better methods than chemo, and I don't hear or see much being done in that area of cancer treatment to improve.

Dr. Susan Love

The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation would like to thank you for blogging about Dr. Susan Love We appreciate your mention and want to emphasize how you can be part of our mission of moving breast cancer beyond a cure and one step closer to prevention. We are encouraging women of all ethnicities and ages to join, so please go to www.armyofwomen.org and sign up today. We also have weekly blogs about the Army of Women, so feel free to visit our website, http://blog.armyofwomen.org. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @ armyofwomen!

Dr. Susan Love

The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation would like to thank you for blogging about Dr. Susan Love. We appreciate your mention and want to emphasize how you can be part of our mission of moving breast cancer beyond a cure and one step closer to prevention. We are encouraging women of all ethnicities and ages to join, so please go to www.armyofwomen.org and sign up today. We also have weekly blogs about the Army of Women, so feel free to visit our website, http://blog.armyofwomen.org. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @ armyofwomen!

Odds

Over 25 years or so I had so many biopsies that my health providers and I joked about playing tic-tac-toe on my breasts. Yes, the process was traumatic in the beginning, but the results were always benign-until the 10th one. Small,surgery, radiation but no chemo, Tamoxifen for five years and much follow-up, but that was all 14 years ago and I'm not whining; I'm living!

a few corrections for Lisa H

You make some good points but you also have some misconceptions. Mammograms do not prevent cancer as you have said. The purpose of screening mammography is to catch cancer early enough before it spreads to other parts of the body. How well the screening progam is going is debatable so far. I am guessing that there are breast cancer survivors out there who are thankful that they had a mammogram. My mother is one of them.

A mammogram does expose the breasts to radiation. Lying at the beach or in a tanning booth does too but why is it no one objects to businesses that promote this activity?

Squeezing a testicle and squeezing a breast would not be the same xperience because the testicle is a hard solid structure and the breast is mostly fat and fibrous tissue. Squeezing a testicle would be more analagous to squeezing your ovary. Your point is still understood - it can be uncomfortable or even painfull for some women to have a mammogram. I know of women who have commented that their experience wasn't nearly anything like the horror stories that other people tell them.

Also, you can't detect prostate cancer by checking the testicles anyway. The prostate gland and the testicles are two different organs.

You are right in that we all should be taking better care of ourselves. Unfortunately most of us don't and most of us don't "pay attention".