Alternative breast cancer screening
Tomorrow – October 21, 2005 – is National Mammography Day.
Sorry, but you can count me out.
If tomorrow was National Breast Cancer Screening Day, I would be more than happy to observe it and promote it. But mammography? If you’ve been reading the e-Alert for a while, you know where I stand on this issue.
In 2001, I told you about new research that supported what many in the alternative medicine community had been saying for years – that mammography does not save women’s lives. As the study pointed out, tumors large enough to be detected by mammography have been growing in the body for a decade or more – too late to truly be called “early detection.” The study called into question the entire theory on which mammography is based; namely, that if you can catch a tumor when it is still too small to be felt, you have a window of opportunity for successful treatment. According to these researchers, the data from decades of widespread mammography don’t bear that out.
In addition, mammograms can actually be harmful.
In the January 2002 issue of his Real Health Breakthroughs newsletter, William Campbell Douglass II, M.D., wrote about what he calls the “compression contradiction.” Dr. Douglass states: “I find it maddeningly contradictory that medical students are taught to examine breasts gently to keep any possible cancer from spreading, yet radiologists are allowed to manhandle them for a mammogram.”
So instead of observing National Mammography Day, I suggest that women rethink it as National Breast Cancer Screening Day and observe it by reading the e-Alert “Easy as 123” (8/5/03), which dispels the three primary myths about mammograms. After that you can take a look at the e-Alert “And 4” (8/6/03), which details these three alternatives to mammograms:
- Digital infrared imaging (DII) – also called thermography
- Anti-malignan Antibody in Serum Test
- Nuclear Matrix Protein Screening
Women, you owe it to yourself to know ALL about breast cancer screening. Not just the one method that’s so heavily promoted by the medical mainstream.
