Mammogram Controversy – Follow the Money
by Virginia Hopkins on 18/11/09 at 4:19 pm
Let’s have some straight talk and commonsense around the mammography controversy that has erupted this week. The bottom line is, this controversy has nothing to do with concern over women’s health, and everything to do with money and politics.
On Monday (Nov 16), the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), part of the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, released a report that recommends against routine mammography screenings for women ages 40 to 49. They recommend that women ages 50 to 74 have a mammogram every two years.
This recommendation reverses PSTF guidelines issued in 2002, recommending that women ages 40 and up have yearly routine mammograms. This 2002 guideline was made, by a different group then at the PSTF, based on money and politics, not on facts or evidence. The reversal of the 2002 guideline this week is based on what is best for women. It also happens to save billions of dollars in healthcare costs and to spare millions of women from unnecessary biopsies and treatments and the enormous expense and stress of that unnecessary medical care.
The controversy is all about those billions of dollars that won’t be flowing into the mammogram industry—the manufacturers, the hospitals, the clinics, the radiologists, the oncologists, the labs doing the biopsies, and so forth. Make no mistake, routine mammographic screening is an industrial machine and an enormous cash cow.
When the PSTF released these recommendations on Monday, via an article in the prestigious journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the American Cancer Society (ACS) simultaneously set loose a blizzard of negative and vitriolic PR saying they disagree with the PSTF change in mammography screening guidelines. The slick, expensive and hysterical ACS campaign was obviously prepared well ahead of time, and includes clips of women in their 40s whose breast cancer was detected via mammogram; clips of women saying “This is Obamacare! Women are going to die! This is gendercide!” and clips of doctors saying the new guidelines are “outrageous” and “dangerous.”
And yet, just a few weeks ago, the head of the ACS spoke to New York Times science writer Gina Kolata (Cancer Group Has Concerns On Screenings) and revealed that the ACS was about to change its recommendations for cancer screenings because overscreening was causing more problems than it was solving, and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Shortly thereafter, the ACS backpeddled and changed its mind. For more details on this sordid little saga, read Dr. Ralph Moss’ article, Discord on Mammography Roils the ACS. Apparently since the ACS started backpeddling, it has been busy spending millions of dollars on a campaign to attack the new PSTF recommendations and to frighten American women into continuing to be overscreened for breast cancer, and to endure unnecessary, expensive and stressful biopsies and treatments.
Kolata’s current article, Panel Urges Mammograms at 50, Not 40 on the PSTF’s new guidelines, curiously does not mention the earlier article in which the ACS was apparently on board with those new guidelines.
The fact is that mammography is, and always has been, a poorly conceived, poorly studied, primitive, ineffective and dangerous way to detect breast cancer, that likely has caused as much breast cancer as it has detected.
We know without any shadow of a doubt that radiation exposure increases the risk of breast cancer. Samuel Epstein MD estimates that over 10 years of routine mammography a premenopausal woman receives almost half as much radiation as was measurable within a mile of the epicenter of the Hiroshima atom bomb explosion.
The very fact that this method of screening for breast cancer was even invented and then allowed into modern medicine is almost incomprehensible. Since mammography screening began, there has been no decline in deaths from breast cancer due to early detection, and no overall drop in deaths from breast cancer that can be attributed to mammography. Routine mammography screening does detect more breast cancers, but it does not save more lives.
The population of women being fought over right now, those from 40 to 49, have denser breast tissue than menopausal women, which makes their breast cancer tumors very difficult to detect on mammograms. Most breast cancer tumors in women this age are likely caught by the women themselves, in the shower. But we don’t know for sure, because that research has never been done!
The “experts” who are defending routine mammograms for women under 50 are saying, and I paraphrase, “Mammograms don’t work that well but it’s all we have so we have to keep doing it!” That is so not true. We have thermography, which is an excellent way to detect breast cancer tumors, but it has never caught on because it’s so safe, easy and inexpensive. It can even distinguish between rapidly growing and slow growing breast tumors, as detailed in the ACS’s very own journal Cancer, in June 2006 (Breast thermography and cancer risk prediction), which concluded, “Thermography is useful not only as a predictor of risk factor for cancer but also to assess the more rapidly growing neoplasms.” The research cited in this study was done 2o to 30 years ago, and thermography, which is now digital, has come a long way since then.
Here’s a helpful article about thermography by Sherrill Sellman, ND, Thermography – Seeing Into the Future and a brochure from a digital thermography company that gives good examples of what a thermogram sees.
Suzanne Sommers’ new bestselling book Knockout takes a one-two punch at America’s cancer industry, and includes dirt on the mammogram industry. But even better, she shines a spotlight on a few of the courageous physicians in the U.S. who are having success with alternative cancer treatments. While I don’t agree with Sommers’ mega-dose approach to bioidentical hormone therapy, she is doing a great service to American health by using her celebrity and huge audience to educate, inform and tell the truth about our terribly dysfunctional and destructive medical industry. In spite of the conventional medical PR machine that is slamming and smearing Sommers, her new book is at the top of the bestseller lists.
Here’s an article by John R. Lee, M.D., Routine Mammograms–Should We or Shouldn’t We, which details some of the evidence against mammograms. There is also helpful information about mammograms, and about breast cancer prevention in our book What Your Doctor May Not Tell You about Breast Cancer.
E. Connors
Nov 22nd, 2009
Notice that the government is not suggesting thermography as a substitute for mammography. Much of the uproar is because citizens recognize the beginning of a “less care is better care” theme that will permeate the health care industry when the health care bill is passed through Congress.
Kate Cherico,RN
Nov 22nd, 2009
No one has addressed the radiation exposure problem. I understand from Dr. Lee’s book on Breast Cancer that each mammogram packs a 3% exposure to radiation that is actually causitive for cancer. Figure if a woman has a yearly mammogram for just ten years her exposure (and thus a risk factor for breast cancer) increases 30%! Who would not link these to the increase in breast cancers we are experiencing. When the diagnostics
actually come with an increased risk for cancer how can anyone trust this as a preventative test? Over time radiation is cumulative and builds with each exposure.
Karen Thompson
Nov 19th, 2009
Was diagnosed with Breast Cancer 1992 at age 43, by exam and biopsy. Tumor was over 5 cm and in 8 of 16 lymph nodes. Had been having mammograms since age 40. Nothing showed on the mammograms even the day that the Dr. found the lump and insisted on biopsy. So, I have known since 1992 that mammograms are not effective in younger women or women with breast implants. Since I now only have 1 breast to montior and a chest wall that also requires observation, the past few years I’ve used Thermography. Was referred by my Oncologist who told me that Thermography gives her a lot more information about what’s going on with lymph nodes, chest and remaining breast than mammogram. This was a “God sent” for me. I don’t have the discomfort of mammogram or the exposure to radiation..plus more information on any changes. So, why doesn’t my insurance cover this? Are they insane? Thermography is FDA approved.
pam
Nov 19th, 2009
This seems like a really alarmist piece here. We really do not have any evidence that mammograms cause cancer and we do have evidence that early detection has saved lives and the more women have been getting screenings, the fatality rate has been going down. I think your piece might be more believable if you cited some actual evidence of both the “money making” of the world of mammography etc. as well as the risks of mammography – you refer to them as if they are facts. The recommendation which came out is confusing enough without your alarmist article. Equally of concern is the implication that women who need screening won’t get it now and that, in fact, the insurance industry will benefit by having something else they don’t have to cover! So timely right before the possibility of real health care reform. I found the piece very unprofessional.
William J. Strandwitz, PhD
Nov 19th, 2009
Thought your readers might want to read this.
Bill
A ‘Death Panel’ Surfaces by John Armor
This week, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force announced its recommendation that women between the ages of 40 and 50 no longer receive routine mammograms to detect breast cancer at its earliest and most curable stage. This was a near-total reversal of the same Task Force’s earlier recommendations, and contrary to the advice of the American Cancer Society and other authorities.
The Task Force did, of course, state its reasons for this radically different recommendation. They used computer modeling of three large studies of breast cancer, in Sweden, Britain, and the United States. According to that work, “For every 1,000 women screened beginning at age 40, the modeling suggested that just 0.7 deaths from breast cancer would be prevented while 480 women would get a false-positive result and 33 more would undergo unnecessary biopsies.”
The total cost of all mammograms of women of all ages is estimated as $5 billion per year, though the Task Force claimed that cost was not a factor in its decision-making. However, the very way they stated the basis of their recommendation suggests that claim is false. It is also one more example of the fact that the American media can totally miss a story which is right under their noses. There has been ample discussion of whether this recommendation makes sense. There is no discussion of how many preventable deaths will occur.
Notice that the women who are inconvenienced by the early exams are numbered. The report says that 480 false positives will result in additional tests, and 33 more will have unnecessary biopsies. What about the women who will die without the tests? That number is concealed behind a seemingly-small number of 0.7 deaths per 1,000. No one in the press apparently thought to open a copy of the last official Census in 2000, and figure out the number of extra deaths.
The Census data divides its results in the middle of every 10 years, rather than at the end of each decade. There are slightly less than 83 million Americans between the ages of 35 and 55. Cut out slightly more than half, because the number of Americans at each individual age, declines as age goes up. So, count 40 million Americans between 40 and 50.
The older we get, the more women there are in each age category. So it is conservative to count half of that group, 20 million, as women. Now, apply that seemingly small 0.7 percent to those Americans. The result is, 140,000 women will die every year if the 40-50 mammograms are eliminated. That is not a misprint. The Task Forces own figure of additional deaths at 0.7 percent does work out to 140,000 additional deaths of women.
Now, this Task Force does not have the power of compulsion. No private or public health programs have changed their policies as a result of this Task Force’s recommendation. However, the government health plan will have a review board which will have compulsion behind it. That board is in the Stimulus Act which has already passed and is in force.
It is that which Sarah Palin and other critics have called a “death panel.” When it has the power to reduce insurance coverage for individuals because some medical efforts are not “cost effective,” the deaths will begin.
No woman in my family “likes” to get a mammogram. But all of them who are older than 40, routinely submit to this life-saving indignity. What will happen when the board with real power cuts out procedures as “inefficient,” as not “cost effective”? People with money to spare may pay for their own mammograms. All the women who depend on insurance will be the first to die of undetected cancers that could have been prevented.
We know this from statistics that are right in front of us, this week. No one else has noticed and reported on the extra deaths. How telling. How sad.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor John Armor practiced law in the Supreme Court for 33 years. John Armor practiced in the US Supreme Court for 33 years. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu His latest book about Thomas Paine is available at http://www.TheseAreTheTimes.us. Contact him at John_Armor@aya.yale.edu.
William J. Strandwitz, PhD
Nov 19th, 2009
I forgot to add in my previous comment, if you want to find a reliable thermography installation to
http://www.thermascan.com then click on
Imaging Centers (on the top of the page).
Type in you state to find one close to you.
William J. Strandwitz, PhD
Nov 19th, 2009
We used thermography by Thermoscan in our medical office and caught breast abnormalities, including cancerous lesions long before mammography studies. It is entirely non-evasive and can be easily repeated with no harm to the woman patient if needed.
We received many complaints from the radiological physicians but not one of them could fault our results.
sandra morey
Nov 19th, 2009
I had a fibroid in my breast in 1994. It was biopsied and found not to be cancerous. Mammography followed it for a couple of years looking for changes. In 1996 the changes were found, but I was not notifed for 3 months as the radiation department does not notify patients in these cases but notifies the doctor. The doctor was reluctant to leave a message alerting me to call him and I am often hard to reach. I didn’t have a cell phone back then. Thus, I went 3 months during which time my cancer was allowed to grow and was present in 2 out of 5 lymph nodes. I eventually called the doctor as I was concerned about not receiving results of my yearly mammogram, left messages for him to call me twice-he didn’t and I finally reached him in. He was horrified that I fell through the cracks and everything was done to assure my timely treatment. I had surgery twice, AC Chemo, radiation and 5 years of tamoxophen. During that time I discovered Dr. Lee and began using natural progesterone cream. I have been in remission since 1996 and hope to stay that way. Mammograms can be helpful in some cases, but even a positive mammogram has to go through channels and in my case there was a big glitch.
Lisa Rey
Nov 19th, 2009
I was diagnosed with breast cancer / stage 2B / 2 positive lymph nodes in 2007 and my very first mamogram caught it. It was not detected with a self examine or a doctor’s breast examine. I was 40. I waited until I was nearing my 41st birthday.
Helga Nehl
Nov 19th, 2009
I agree that mammograms are a huge industry and don’t really help to prevent breast cancer. I know of women who had annual mams for 10-15-20 yrs and still end up with breast cancer. I know women who have never had mams and they’re in their 60-70-80s and are cancer free. Most of the latter had nutrition dense diets early in life.