I am choosy with my doctors because I have specific ideas about my healthcare. I also have strong opinions about the medical communities conventional methods of staying healthy. I want someone who invites me to take care of my body naturally and who does not throw a pill at every complaint. She must support my research and work with me to educate myself to best decide my care. I would never go to a provider who is threatened by my want to be educated enough to form my own thoughts and opinions. My doctor listens to my concerns and respectfully takes the time to consider the facts I present while helping me to fill in any information I may need.
Like most, I am troubled by the number of young people in my life who I have seen get cancer and then subsequently pass because of it. Speaking to my friends who work in the medical industry, I became even more disheartened. Over and over I heard them say that if they were ever diagnosed, they would seek alternative care- rather than go with conventional cancer treatments. With that in mind, I began to study. The statistics are alarming, and this is information that everyone should understand in these times.
The first shock that I uncovered was the folly of our promotion of well-care screenings that have become a standard of care in America. We are made to believe these screenings are our best defense against getting sick. I have good health insurance and am health conscious, so it seems a no-brainer that I would run out and get mine- but I don't, and there is a reason.
I quickly found that breast and prostate cancers are the most over-diagnosed and over-treated cancers in America.
They estimate that screen-detected breast tumors have an overdiagnosis rate of 14.7% to 38.6% (excluding ductal carcinoma in situ). This is the latest of several studies using various methods and data sets to show that the phenomenon of overdiagnosis exists in breast cancer. Estimates of this overdiagnosis rate vary but range up to 54% of screen-detected localized tumors, with most estimates between 15% and 25% (2). http://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2597574/accepting-existence-breast-cancer-overdiagnosis.
Anyone who has ever had a health scare knows the stress that the fear produces. Stress alone is a danger to our health and overdiagnosis of cancer at best, means unnecessary worry. Unfortunately, it only gets worse from there. Next comes unneeded, expensive and invasive testing. And sadly, many will go on to have unnecessary cancer treatments that are likely more dangerous than their original condition.
Mammographically detected breast cancers are much more likely to have low-risk biology than symptomatic tumors found between screenings (interval cancers) or that present as clinical masses. Importantly, ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) lesions, or what have been called stage I cancers, in and of themselves are not life-threatening. [Yet] situ lesions have been treated in a manner similar to that of invasive cancer, but there is little evidence to support that this practice has improved mortality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24451829
This means the "cancers" that mammography most often detects are only non-cancerous lesions that may go away on their own and even if they stay, may never go on to become cancerous. It also means that women are being given potentially fatal treatments for conditions that are not a mortal threat.
One in three women with breast cancer detected by a mammogram is treated unnecessarily, because screening tests found tumors that are so slow-growing that they're mostly harmless, according to a Danish study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine, which has renewed debate over the value of early detection. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/health/breast-cancer-unnecessary-treatment-study-partner/index.html
If your doctor, like mine, began to advise you to have mammograms at the age of 40 you have a 50-60% chance of getting a false positive by the time you are 50 years old.
The chance of a false positive result is higher among younger women and women with dense breasts [28]. (Most women younger than 50 have dense breasts, so there's overlap among these groups.) https://ww5.komen.org/BreastCancer/AccuracyofMammograms.html
Overdiagnosis becomes even more problematic when it requires more mammograms which means further exposure to radiation which then raises your chances of developing all forms of cancer.
The report, "Breast Cancer and the Environment: A Life Course Approach," concluded that about 2,800 breast-cancer cases a year among U.S. women stem from medical radiation.
So what are the repercussions of the treatments these patients receive? Statistics show that cancer treatments are often deadly. A large percentage of patients will not survive the first 30 days after their first chemotherapy treatment.
Around 8 percent of cancer patients are dying within 15 days of starting treatment, a startling new study has discovered. https://www.wddty.com/magazine/2017/january/chemos-early-victims.html
For these women who have slow-growing cancers or benign lesions, the risk does not justify the high stakes of the cancer treatment. Many do not understand that surviving 5 years after cancer treatments is considered a success in the survival statistics they are provided. The dangers of future consequences are dismissed, and most patients are not told about the damage that will have been done to their body during those treatments, should they survive.
There's insufficient evidence that earlier screening does more good than harm. Research showed that for some women with Stages 1 and 2 breast cancer, the absolute survival benefit from preventive double mastectomies is less than 1% after 20 years and no matter how a woman is treated for DCIS, the mortality risk is 3%--similar to the average for the general population. And some women with early-stage breast cancer don't benefit from chemo and can skip it. http://time.com/4057310/breast-cancer-overtreatment/
The truth is, our doctors have become such advocates of screening and early detection that they are ignoring the problems as they are discovered with those screenings. Perhaps our want to believe there are benefits of early detection is so strong that it prompts us to go on with the useless tests even when science knows they are not of value.
It is concluded that we have reached the point of negligible benefit from mammography screening for breast cancer in women at average risk, and that we should concentrate on early diagnosis of breast cancer and the application of modern therapy according to clearly defined sub-types of breast cancer. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13697137.2017.1392503
Naturally, people are frightened of being sick. It seems because of that anxiety we often make decisions to act aggressively even when the effect may be worse than the condition itself. We assume that any cancer leads to death, and that thought overshadows the fact that screenings or early diagnosis might be creating some of the problems.
Harm is occurring because of misinformation and misunderstanding. We have even seen such panic over a cancerous occurrence or possible recurrence that women have decided to seek treatment with no diagnoses at all. If people were better informed about the risks of the remedy perhaps over-treatment and the subsequent deadly side-effects would decrease.
Rather than push tests that stir up fear and panic even though they have little value, let us help people understand their bodies. I believe preventative care should teach how diet and lifestyle are our best ways to promote good health. Instead of testing people lets test the products that are poisoning us and causing cancer.
To save lives, we have to inform people and give them the tools they need to make decisions that help rather than harm them.
For my research, I used these links:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322920/
http://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2596394/breast-cancer-screening-denmark-cohort-study-tumor-size-overdiagnosis
https://ww5.komen.org/BreastCancer/AccuracyofMammograms.html
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2011/10/10778/high-rate-false-positives-annual-mammogram
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24451829
http://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2597574/accepting-existence-breast-cancer-overdiagnosis
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/health/breast-cancer-unnecessary-treatment-study-partner/index.html
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1853165
http://time.com/4057310/breast-cancer-overtreatment/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4322920/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-64310-6_13
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673606698346
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article-abstract/69/2/349/880428
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002961017315635
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13697137.2017.1392503
