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Emily B. maybe the government task force on mammography was actually a plot by radiologists to get more American
women to insist on mammograms. This whole mess is partly the fault of
the cancer establishment. Think how many times you've heard "one in
eight women will get breast cancer in her lifetime” – a slogan that
always makes me wonder how you pull off the trick of getting cancer
after your lifetime. It turns out that statistic is not about actual
incidence, but a projection
of how many women would get breast cancer if every woman lived to be 85
– which they don’t. The real numbers are alarming enough without
inflating our sense of risk with this statistical trick. A woman who
is 40 actually has a one in 69 risk of getting breast cancer in the
subsequent decade. But you can hardly blame women for the reaction that
they don’t trust the task force report. First we’re browbeaten into
getting mammograms and told if we don’t do this yearly we’re risking
our lives and potentially leaving our children motherless. Then we’re
told, "Never mind!"
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Depressing poll numbers from Gallup and USA Today (via Instapundit):
Seventy-six percent of women say they disagree or strongly disagree
with the recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to
delay mammograms to age 50. And 84 percent ages 35 to 49 say they plan
to get the screenings anyway. Why? Because they're suspicious and
confused: "Seventy-six percent of women said they believe that the
panel based its conclusions on cost, even though the task force's
report included only scientific studies. Women also perceive their
breast cancer risk to be higher than it really is."
Terrific: We're having another death panel moment. The promise of sensible cost-cutting, grounded in evidence-based medicine, gets plowed under ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Emily B,
I agree with you that it’s really unfortunate that the conclusion that
we don’t need to routinely do mammograms until 50, instead of aparking
a national, rational discussion about the advisability of “screening
and prevention,” has become the harbinger that we’re all going to live
under British health care rationing. The debate over whether we benefit
from searching for early cancers is not new, and no wonder the public
is so confused. This is like the “no fat” to “no carbs” pendulum swings
on official diet recommendation ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Cindy Pearson, the executive director of the National Women's Health Network:
Mammography screening just doesn’t work very well in women before menopause, as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has now recognized.
Everyone hoped that it would. But in 1993, it became clear from
well-done studies that our hopes hadn’t panned out, and screening just
didn’t work well for women in their 40s (or at all, for even younger
women). The fact that most women didn’t know this, and instead received
a falsely optimistic message about the life-saving benefits of
once-a-year mammography screening, was incredibly frustrating. More background here.
At the National Women’s Health Network, we’re glad that the
federally appointed task force has told the truth about what studies
have found. Now women have a better chance of getting an honest
assessment about the value of a heavily promoted technology.
Information is always a good thing ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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We keep hearing from proponents of health care reform that government rationing of health care is a “canard.”
We don’t have health care reform yet, but with the new recommendations
from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women shouldn’t get
mammograms until the age of 50, and then only every two years, it feels
like we’re getting the rationing.
The Los Angeles Times writes
that “[i]nsurance companies and Medicare administrators … said they
they would continue to pay for the procedure -- although it is not
clear how long they can resist the panel's influence.” The LAT adds that the panel’s recommendations are “generally followed” by insurers and Medicare ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Hanna, the counterpart to your post about the dangers of prostate screening appeared in today's New York Times—a story about whether annual mammograms may be doing more harm than good. This isn't the first piece I've read that questions the mammogram orthodoxy. There's no argument that finding a potentially fatal breast cancer can save a life. But the skeptics say that many, many woman who have indolent cancers that would never progress are forced into surgery and chemotherapy. The problem is that medicine cannot sort the dangerous tumors from the relatively benign ones (and who'd have thought we'd hear that some cancers are better just left alone?). The piece ends with an expert in health risk saying having mammograms or not having mammograms are both reasonable choices for women to make. That's helpful!