Breast cancer is a serious concern. Nearly 250,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. It is, by a long shot, the most common cancer among women in the U.S.
In an effort to catch it early in the hopes that it can be treated before it’s too late, the American Cancer Society recommends women over 45 get a mammogram every year. And most doctors follow that recommendation.
But for something so widely recommended, and something that has the potential to absolutely devastate any women and her family, mammograms are shockingly inaccurate. In the field of statistics, there is always a margin of error, meaning that because there are always exceptions to every rule, nothing is ever black & white, and various other reasons, we accept that a certain amount of error will always occur in anything from medical diagnosis to the opinions people have about the president to the average lifespan of a fruit fly and everything in between. If that margin of error goes beyond 8%, statistics generally considers it not accurate enough upon which to base any decisions or certainty.
This puts mammograms well beyond the acceptable margin of error and essentially means we shouldn’t be considering them the gold standard of breast cancer detection.
Get this: 61 percent of women who get a mammogram every year and at some point receive a request for a follow-up don’t have breast cancer. To put it another way, when a woman gets a mammogram, gets the results, and is told she might have breast cancer and further investigation is needed, 61% of the time she doesn’t have breast cancer. That’s almost two-thirds. So two-thirds of women get a breast cancer scare unnecessarily.
That’s a lot of stress and fear and worry for nothing. But just imagine the relief when it all comes back negative!
What about the other side? The reason we have mammograms is to detect breast cancer? What if a woman does have breast cancer but the mammogram doesn’t catch it?
Turns out this is between 10 to 15% depending on how you define cancer—which we’ll get into later.
That’ means at least one out of ten women who get a mammograms, hears that everything is A-OK and go home without a care in the world, even though they actually do have breast cancer! For perspective, tests for the HIV virus are 99.97% accurate.
So why do we keep using recommending mammograms? Why this endless push to corral women into the testing bay? We’ve even got mammograms on busses that will travel to YOU if you’re too busy to go to the clinic.
A lot of people chalk it up to sunken cost fallacy. We built up a nationwide health infrastructure around mammograms. Every hospital has a mammogram unit, with a trained technician and most importantly, a city full of women who are all but guaranteed to come in every year and pay for a mammogram.
Russell Blaylock, a retired neurosurgeon who now travels the country lecturing on health and nutrition, said “diagnostics are really not that accurate”, but “so much money is being made, and so much money has been invested in these units in hospitals, that no one wants to admit the truth.”
Where cancer is a grey area
What happens if you get a diagnosis? Well, get clear on exactly what you condition is. 33 percent (one-third) of breast cancer diagnoses that begin with a mammogram are what’s called Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS), which is abnormal growth of cells within the milk ducts of the breast forming a lesion commonly between 1-1.5 cm in diameter.
This isn’t actually cancer. It has the potential to someday develop into cancer, but it is not cancer. It’s tiny lesions that, by themselves, are completely harmless. BUT, over 50,000 women are treated for DCIS every year, which includes everything from chemotherapy, radiation and even mastectomies. In fact, 25% of women diagnosed with DCIS end up getting a mastectomy.
But it’s a big win for the cancer industry, which gets to boast a near 100% recovery rate from DCIS. It makes those oncologists look like angels, and the drug companies look like geniuses. But it’s a hollow victory. Why? Because DCIS is not cancer.
What would happen if I simply just continued living my life as normal?
If a woman gets a breast cancer diagnosis, but decides to just carry on as normal, what are the possible outcomes?
Well, one is metastasizing cancer cells, spread to the lymph nodes and eventual death.
But a lot of the time, that happens anyway–about 12% of the time to be exact. As far as cancer goes, breast cancer has a pretty good survival rate.
But is that because women are rushed into the cancer assembly line? Or is it something different?
A 2011 study published in Journal of Lancet Oncology found from a sample group of 65,000 Swedish women that the more often a woman got a cancer screening, the more likely she was to get a diagnosis. Later surveys have confirmed that, and many doctors even in the mainstream are now recommending that instead of once a year, women get mammograms once every OTHER year.
What does this mean? It could mean that cancer screenings are causing cancer, but absolutely no evidence supports that. The other possibility is that cancer, or lesions like DCIS, come and go on their own. That is to say, it’s highly probable that breast tumors spontaneously recede when left untreated in many cases.
Something to think about.
In any case, for you ladies, if you get a mammogram, don’t immediately trust the results. Consider adding a thermographic test to the mix as well if you have concerns. Thermography measures subtle differences in temperature on the skin, which can often be an indicator of a tumor. The combination of the two should give a much more accurate picture of what’s going on.