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Posts Tagged ‘mammogram’

Lies of breast cancer industry unravel as screening review shows startling over-diagnosis

Posted in Jan-June 2013, tagged , on June 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Most of the women who undergo routine mammogram screenings for breast cancer will never actually derive any real benefit from the radioactive procedure, while the majority of those who end up testing positive for tumors as a result of mammography will undergo needless treatments for malignancies that never would have led to any health problems.

These are the unsettling findings of a review recently published in the journal The Lancet, which found that for every woman whose life is supposedly saved as a result of early detection, three others undergo invasive surgery, toxic chemotherapy, or immune-destroying radiation treatments for benign tumors that never would have resulted in fatality.

This shocking information represents yet one more nail in the coffin for the barbaric practice of mammography, which is still touted by the mainstream medical system as the premier method by which women have the best chance of not dying from breast cancer. Not only are women not being told about the significant radioactive risks associated with getting mammograms, but they are also not being told that the procedure often detects noncancerous tumors.

According to the review, 1,307 women avoid dying from breast cancer every single year in the U.K. as a result of being screened for breast cancer. But another 3,971 women every year also end up opting for unnecessary, expensive, and highly-toxic treatment procedures for benign tumors as a result of mammography, which causes many of them to suffer irreparable damage to their immune health.

According to a similar study released earlier this year out of Norway, as many as 25 percent of the breast cancers detected by mammography would have never even caused any health problems during the women’s lifetimes. At the same time, mammography also fails to detect as many as 10 percent of harmful breast tumors, indicating that it is a highly unreliable, and very toxic, breast cancer detection method that needs to be effectively phased out of mainstream use.

“Once you’ve decided to undergo mammography screening, you also have to deal with the consequences that you might be over-diagnosed,” says Dr. Metter Kalager, a breast surgeon at Telemark Hospital in Norway about the widespread problem of breast cancer over-diagnosis. “By then, I think, it’s too late. You have to get treated.”

“The truth is that we’ve exaggerated the benefits of screening and we’ve ignored the harms. I think we’re headed to a place where we realize we need to give women a more balanced message: Mammography helps some people but it leads others to be treated unnecessarily.”

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Read this before your next mammogram

Posted in Jan-June 2012, tagged , on May 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Is your hospital giving you a discount for your next mammogram? Or is your doctor recommending that you do one soon, as a preventive measure?

If yes, I suggest you read THIS first.

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Widely used CAD mammography tool fails to find invasive breast cancer, causes needless tests and stress

Posted in July-Sept 2011, tagged , on July 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Computer-aided detection (CAD) technology, which analyzes mammography images and marks suspicious areas for radiologists to review, has been widely hyped and pushed on women as a way to insure invasive breast cancer is spotted on mammograms. And it has grown into a huge industry, adding millions of dollars to the cost of healthcare.

The problem is, CAD simply doesn’t work — at all. That’s right. Despite the fact CAD is now applied to the large majority of screening mammograms in the U.S. with annual direct Medicare costs exceeding $30 million (according to a 2010 study in theJournal of the American College of Radiology), new research by University of California at Davis (UC Davis) scientists shows the expensive technology is ineffective in finding breast tumors.

But it does something extremely well. It causes enormous stress by greatly increasing a woman’s risk of being called back for more costly testing following a CAD analyzed mammogram.

The new research, just published in theJournal of the National Cancer Institute, used data from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium to analyze 1.6 million mammograms. Entitled “Effectiveness of Computer-Aided Detection in Community Mammography Practice,” the study specifically looked at screening mammograms performed on more than 680,000 women at 9 0mammography facilities in seven U.S. states, between the years of 1998 and 2006.

The results are being hailed as the most definitive findings to date on whether the super popular mammography tool is effective in locating cancer in the breast. The findings? CAD is a waste of time and money.

The false-positive rate increased from 8.1 percent before CAD to 8.6 percent after CAD was installed at the medical centers in the study. What’s more, the detection rate of breast cancer and the stage and size of breast cancer tumors were similar regardless of whether or not CAD was used.

“In real-world practice, CAD increases the chances of being unnecessarily called back for further testing because of false-positive results without clear benefits to women,”Joshua Fenton, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Family and Community Medicine, said in a statement to the media. “Breast cancers were detected at a similar stage and size regardless of whether or not radiologists used CAD.”

This isn’t the first time the CAD technology has been questioned by researchers. The current study follows a previous study of the computer aided mammography tool that was published by Dr. Fenton in theNew England Journal of Medicinein 2007.

That examination of mammography screening results in 43 facilities, including seven that used CAD, found that CAD was actually linked toreduced accuracyof mammogram screenings and produced no difference in the detection rate of invasive breast cancer.

“In the current study, we evaluated newer technology in a larger sample and
over a longer time period,” Fenton noted in a statement to the press. “We also looked for the first time at cancer stage and cancer size, which are critical for understanding how CAD may affect long-term breast cancer outcomes, such as mortality.”

CAD software was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration back in 1998, but its use only skyrocketed after Medicare began covering it in 2001. According to 2009 Medicare data, using CAD adds another $12 to the costs of having a mammogram (about $81 for film mammography and $130 for digital mammography), representing a 9 percent to 15 percent additional cost for CAD use.

For more information:

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/newsroom

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Study verifies mammography screenings cause cancer

Posted in December 2009, Healing the Sick, tagged , on December 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »

A new study presented on December 1 at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) verified that annual mammography screenings may be responsible for causing breast cancer in women who are predisposed to the disease. Epidemiologist Marijke C. Jansen-van der Weide from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands suggests that doctors should be very cautious when screening younger women, especially those under age 30.

There are many conflicting reports about the benefits of mammography screenings, particularly among younger women below the age of 40. Because there is a high risk among women with genetic or familial predispositions to breast cancer when getting mammograms, Dr. Jansen-van der Weide and her research team are suggesting that these women get an alternative screening. Ultrasounds, MRIs, and heat thermography screenings are some alternatives that do not expose patients to radiation.

The study evaluated women in the high-risk group and determined that low-dose mammography radiation increased these women’s risk of developing breast cancer by 150 percent. Women under 20 who have had at least five mammograms are 2.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer than high-risk women who have never undergone low-dose mammography screenings.

Study authors emphasized the fact that doctors should be cautious in administering mammograms to younger women, especially those with a family history of breast cancer. Moderate- to low-risk women were not evaluated in the study. Alternative screening methods were encouraged in order to reduce the risk of women in high-risk groups from being harmed by radioactive exposure.

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What this study really reveals is that there is no reason for any women to ever receive a mammogram ever again. Ultrasound and thermography should now be the new standard for breast cancer detection screenings, as they do not subject women to excess radiation.

This study also reveals that mammograms are really “repeat business machines” for the cancer industry. When enough women are subjected to mammography, a windfall of future cancer patients is absolutely assured, and this translates into billions of dollars in profits for the businesses invested in cancer: Big Pharma, mammogram machine manufacturers, and so on.

In fact, mammograms represent the slickest marketing gimmick we’ve ever seen in modern medicine. It’s a technology that recruits new patients by actually causing the disease is claims to “detect.” No wonder all the cancer industry non-profit groups donate so much money to breast cancer screening — it’s the best way to keep their sponsors in business!

Just take a look at the Susan Komen for the Cure non-profit, and you’ll see that a huge percentage of all the money they raise for “finding a cure” is really redirected to funding “free breast cancer screenings” that target poor women. The purpose of this whole scheme is to herd more women into extremely profitable (and extremely dangerous) cancer treatment cancers that generate billions for the cancer industry.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea…

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