Breast cancer screenings result in more pain than prevention
The breast cancer industry doesn’t like to let facts get in the way of good marketing.
For years they’ve been putting out the bumper stickers… the brochures… the reminder cards… and the commercials making the phony promise that an annual mammogram could save your life.
But a new Ivy League study has proven that’s a dangerous lie. In fact, researchers say they now have the smoking-gun proof that a mammogram is more likely to wreck your life than add a single day to it.
Does this test actually save lives?
And the answer was a complete, resounding — and hopefully final – no.
The research team poured over 10 years’ worth of mammogram screenings, breast cancer diagnoses and deaths from 550 counties across America. The study included nearly 16 million women.
And when all the data was crunched, researchers couldn’t find a shred of evidence that getting a mammogram will add a day to your life.
You see, the counties where most women got mammograms had the exact same breast cancer death rates as the counties where relatively few women opted for the screening. And even as counties increased their mammogram screening rates over the 10 years studied, their death rates didn’t budge.
In other words, more mammograms didn’t mean fewer deaths. And, in fact, a previous study out of Canada that tracked 90,000 women for 25 years found the same exact thing.
Charles Harding, the lead author of this latest research, admits that his study “raises important questions about the benefits of mammography screening.”
Harding and his colleagues discovered that mammograms were more likely to trigger painful, life-changing and unnecessary treatments than save a woman from a deadly cancer. In fact, they called overtreatment and overdiagnosis the most common effect of mammograms.
Women with tumors that were small, isolated and harmless were regularly being sent for follow-up biopsies, surgeries, and more screenings they didn’t need after getting mammograms.
Plus, as I’ve been telling you for years, mammograms often inflict one more appalling toll on women: false positives. LOTS of false positives.
Just this past spring a Harvard study tracked 77,000 women who’d been sent for screenings and treatment after being told that their mammogram results were “suspicious.”
And it turned out that nearly 99 percent of them had no cancer at all.
Imagine all the agonizing days and sleepless nights those women went through for nothing.
The mammogram has been called the gold standard for breast cancer diagnosis – but really it’s more like a golden payday for the mainstream. Previous studies have found that we’re spending nearly $4 billion a year on pointless tests and follow-ups after false-positives generated by mammograms.
That’s a lot of cash… and a lot of misery… for a test that’s proven time and time again that it’s not saving lives.
Sources:
“Mammograms may not reduce breast cancer deaths” Reuters, July 7, 2015, Fox News, foxnews.com
