At what point does all the conflicting information constitute, if not a criminal act, at least an immoral one?
The latest volley in the war over whether or not mammograms save lives comes from researchers out of Dartmouth College, who published a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine that asserts,"Most screen-detected breast cancer survivors have been either overdiagnosed or diagnosed early without effect on mortality risk."
In other words, they believe that only between 3-13 percent of women with breast cancer that was detected by mammography screening in their 50's managed to avoid a death from breast cancer on account of that early screening.
This flies directly in the face of what many survivors have to say, as well as what is generally supported as one of the guiding precepts of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM), which stresses early detection. Early detection also possibly means some chemotherapy drugs made by AstraZeneca, the company that founded and continues to run NBCAM--an wildly underreported conflict of interest.
Women wanting the latest and best information about the efficacy of screening through mammograms might be better off not reading news items like this one and so many others, and simply going by what their doctor recommends.
Source
Welch HG et al. Likelihood That a Woman With Screen-Detected Breast Cancer Has Had Her "Life Saved" by That Screening. Arch Intern Med. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.476
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