It’s a major wake-up call for the medical mainstream: Mammograms are vastly overrated

Not moving on

If you’ve got a medical procedure that does more harm than good, you get rid of it, right? When the issue is health, you go with the healthiest option.

Problem solved!

If only it were that easy.

I’m afraid it’s going to take a long LONG time to get rid of the mammography problem. That’s because the radiation industry is still stuck in the first stage of grief: denial.

Myth vs. fact

Three years ago, the U.S. Preventive Task Force produced evidence to change recommended mammogram screening to every other year, starting at age 50.

The medical mainstream said, “No.”

Earlier this year, I told you about an 11-year study that confirmed the Task Force results.

The mainstream said, “No.’

Now we have a MUCH longer, larger study. And this research has produced the same conclusions.

And the mainstream response? I don’t even have to say it.

Earth to mainstream… Wake up! Get your head out of the sand. Stick a fork in it. The fat lady has sung. The ship has sailed. Any way you mix the metaphors, it turns out the same. Game over.

In the new study, researchers looked at more than 30 years of breast cancer and mammogram data. They came to two clear conclusions…

1) Early detection of breast cancer does not lower the rate of advanced cancers.

2) U.S. doctors misdiagnosed more than one million women during the study period

That means untold hundreds of thousands of women underwent unnecessary biopsies, surgeries, radiation therapies, and chemotherapies.

But according to Barbara Monsees, hey, that’s just the way it goes.

Monsees is chairwoman of the American College of Radiology Breast Imaging Commission. In other words, she’s a deep insider in the radiology industry.

She told Bloomberg, “At this point in time we really don’t have a choice anyway.”

No choice? That’s complete denial.

Just a few weeks ago, the FDA approved the Automated Breast Ultrasound System. In ABUS, there’s no breast compression, and ZERO radiation exposure. And with a new technique called elastography, ultrasound technicians can accurately spot malignant tumors.

So the future of breast cancer screening has already arrived. And it includes a dramatic reduction in false positives and overdiagnosis.

Finally, women win.

Researchers in the new study say that conservative screening guidelines would reduce the average number of lifetime mammograms from 40 to just 13.

I’d say that’s 13-too-many mammograms.

But 13 ABUS exams sounds just about right.

Sources:
“Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Incidence” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 367, 11/22/12, nejm.org

“Early Breast Cancer Screens Shown to Have Limited Benefit” Nicole Ostrow, Bloomberg, 11/22/12, bloomberg.com