New study casts doubt on safety and benefits of mammograms

Despite what you may have heard, mammograms aren’t really the lifesavers they’re made out to be.

If that sounds like crazy talk to you, I bet you’ll never guess who said it!

None other than Dr. Otis Brawley, who just happens to be the medical officer of the extremely mainstream American Cancer Society.

Not only that, but Dr. Brawley also said, “We are curing people that don’t need curing.”

Those comments were made in response to the latest study on routine mammography.

And what it’s telling us is that more women are being harmed by these tests than are being saved.

Beyond the pink ribbons

I’m sure you know someone who firmly believes that a mammogram has saved her life.

But it’s much more likely it turned her life upside down, scared her half to death and caused her to go through more tests, possibly surgery and risky “curative” treatments for no good reason at all.

Chances are, she was given a breast cancer diagnosis for a small, slow-growing tumor that never would have caused any problems. Or, perhaps she was told she had that (non)cancer called “ductal carcinoma in situ” (DCIS).

Either way, as this new research has found (once again), mammograms are causing many healthy women to experience a life-changing — not a life-saving — event.

As Dr. Karsten Jorgensen, the lead author of this new study, pointed out, a breast cancer diagnosis leads straight to “overtreatment with surgery, radiotherapy and sometimes chemotherapy.” All of which are treatments that can have “lethal consequences.”

I know, all this talk flies in the face of everything we’ve heard about attacking every single tumor before it has a chance to turn deadly.

But that whole idea is fast heading to the medical dust bin, along with bloodletting and drilling a hole in someone’s head to cure headaches.

Dr. Jorgensen and his team examined the records on 95,000 women in Denmark for three decades who were diagnosed with breast cancer. And he found that despite all those years of screening, it didn’t “reduce the incidence of advanced tumors” — which is the whole point of all that testing.

In fact, up to a third of those women were either misdiagnosed or had slow-growing tumors that didn’t require treatment. And as Dr. Brawley noted, often those pea-sized lesions that are found during a mammogram will “regress over time.”

This big study, however, isn’t the first time we’ve heard experts tell us similar things about mammography. Another done last year and published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 80 percent of women given a breast cancer diagnosis due to a mammogram wouldn’t have died even if their tumor went undetected.

And three years ago a study out of Canada of 90,000 women also found that routine mammograms do not reduce the number of women who die from breast cancer. Plus that, this research concluded that one in five cancers detected this way don’t even need further treatment.

Then there’s also the very big issue of false alarms.

Mammograms are well-known to be extremely unreliable, causing many women to suffer through even more tests and treatments when they don’t have cancer in the first place.

Despite what Dr. Brawley said, I fully expect the researchers who worked on this study to be professionally tarred and feathered. That’s the usual course of action when long-held beliefs are challenged.

But whatever you may hear in the news about this research, don’t forget that one of the most important things you can do is a breast self-exam. You can learn how to do it correctly from a nurse or doctor, and do it every month.

“Time to rethink mammograms, American Cancer Society top doc says” Maggie Fox, NBC News, nbcnews.com