Mammography is a great example of a stubborn head-in-the-sand approach to cancer screening says Dr. Mercola. He further said Americans are already exposed to seven times more radiation from diagnostic scans than they were in 1980. It is well known that ionizing radiation increases the cellular mutations that lead to cancer—and mammograms aim at a highly focused dose directly at your breasts, thereby increasing your cancer risk!
WHY would you want to do this?
Mammograms expose your body to radiation that can be 1,000 times greater than a chest x-ray, which we know poses a cancer risk. Mammography also compresses your breasts tightly, and often painfully, which could lead to a lethal spread of cancerous cells, should they exist. Dr. Charles B. Simone, a former clinical associate in immunology and pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute, said:
“Mammograms increase the risk for developing breast cancer and raise the risk of spreading or metastasizing an existing growth.”
Others have spoken out against mammography. Dr. Samuel Epstein, a top cancer expert who has been warning people for years about the dangers of mammography, explains:
“The premenopausal breast is highly sensitive to radiation, each 1 rad exposure increasing breast cancer risk by about 1 percent, with a cumulative 10 percent increased risk for each breast over a decade’s screening…”
“The high sensitivity of the breast, especially in young women, to radiation-induced cancer was known by 1970. Nevertheless, the establishment then screened some 300,000 women with X-ray dosages so high as to increase breast cancer risk by up to 20 percent in women aged 40 to 50 who were mammogramed annually.”
In July 1995, an article in The Lancet about mammograms read:
“The benefit is marginal, the harm caused is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous.”
There is no solid evidence that mammograms save lives, in spite of the propaganda some organizations constantly parrot to the press. Mammograms are often touted as a “life-saving” form of cancer screening, responsible for reducing breast cancer death rates by 15 to 25 percent. But this reported benefit is based on outdated studies done decades ago.
In September 2010, the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals, published the first recent study in years to look at the effectiveness of mammograms, and their findings are a far cry from what most public health officials and physicians would have you believe.
Their bottom line was that mammograms might have only reduced cancer death rates by 0.4 deaths per 1,000 women—an amount so small it may as well be zero. Put another way, 2,500 women would have to be screened over 10 years for a single breast cancer death to be avoided.
So, not only are mammograms unsafe, but they are NOT saving lives as many professionals believed they were.
Past research has also demonstrated that adding an annual mammogram to a careful physical examination of the breasts does not improve breast cancer survival rates over a physical examination alone.
Another glaring problem with mammography is its unacceptably high rate of false positives. If a mammogram detects an abnormal spot in a woman’s breast, the next step is typically a biopsy. This involves taking a small amount of tissue from the breast, which is then looked at by a pathologist under a microscope to determine if cancer is present. Estimates are that 17 percent of DCIS cases found through needle biopsy are misdiagnosed.
Mammograms carry a first-time false positive rate of up to 6 percent.
The problem is that early stage cancer like DCIS can be very hard to diagnose, and pathologists have a wide range of experience and expertise. There are no diagnostic standards for DCIS, and there are no requirements that the pathologists doing the readings have specialized expertise.
Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville, told the New York Times:
“There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”
Unnecessary Mastectomies are More Common than You Might Think
False positives can lead to unnecessary emotional stress and expensive repeat screenings, exposing you to even more radiation, chemotherapy, and unnecessary invasive procedures including biopsies and major surgery. Women have actually undergone unnecessary mastectomies after receiving a false positive mammogram report.
After receiving a breast cancer diagnosis, most women are afraid and even frantic to do whatever it takes, as soon as possible, to fight and remove the cancer. And usually, that involves the “slash and burn” approach. Can you imagine what it would be like to go through surgery, having one or both of your breasts removed along with receiving debilitating radiation treatments and toxic drugs, only to later be told that you never had cancer?
This scenario happens more often than you might think; you can read about several women’s terrifying ordeals with false breast cancer diagnoses here.
And there is new evidence that breast cancer might go away on its own a fair amount of the time. Yes—WITHOUT intervention. A group of researchers who track breast cancer rates found evidence to suggest that some tumors found by mammograms might naturally disappear on their own.
Mammograms will not prevent you from getting breast cancer, and the latest study shows they offer very little benefit in improving your chances of survival. Effective cancer screening methods are important, but mammography is simply NOT the answer.
But then, what is the answer?
The screening tool I recommend is breast thermography and Ultrasonography is also excellent. Ultrasound is radiation free an uses sound waves for breast examination.
What About Breast Self-Exams?
Breast self-exams have long been recommended as a simple way for women to keep track of anything unusual in their breasts. Now, after studies have found that such exams do not reduce breast cancer death rates and actually increase the rate of unnecessary biopsies, many experts are recommending a more relaxed approach known as “breast awareness.”
Breast awareness is really self-explanatory. It means you should regularly check your breasts for changes, but can do so in a way that feels natural to you. In other words, you don’t have to do it on the same day each month, or using any particular pattern.
Simply be aware of what’s normal for you so you can recognize anything out of the ordinary. Although breast cancer is much less common in men, it certainly wouldn’t hurt for men to practice “breast awareness” as well.
Raphael Nyarkotey Obu: PhD(A. M) is a Research Professor of Prostate Cancer and Holistic Medicine at Da Vinci College of Holistic Medicine, Cyprus and the Director of Men’s Health Foundation Ghana & Nigeria Chapter
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