Really excellent article in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) over the summer on the overdiagnosis that is an inevitable feature of screening mammography.

Please see www.bmj.com/.../b2587

The point of this research published in the British Medical Journal is that mammography finds harmless lesions that look like cancer (even under a microscope), but are meaningless.  This leads women to get cancer treatment that they don’t need.  Women routinely get all or part of a breast removed, get radiation that can cause lung cancer and deadly heart problems, and receive toxic chemotherapy ALL FOR NOTHING.  This happens in 1 of 3 cases of “breast cancer” that are identified via mammography screening.  These women are all told how lucky they are, when in reality if they hadn’t been screened they would have never had breast cancer at all.  Hard to believe, but it’s true.

It is clear at this point that most older women have cancer cells in their breasts, but the majority of the time these will not grow or spread, and they may disappear on their own.  Yet if this harmless condition is found, the woman will be put through the cancer mill, all the while being told how “lucky” she is.  

In the United States, there is a huge propaganda machine that bullies and pushes women into mammography without informing them of the risks.  Instead women are told that if they get screened maybe they won’t need a mastectomy, but just a little tiny operation.  However, women who are screened via mammography are about 30% more likely to have the entire breast cut off than women who refuse screening.  Yet we never hear about this.  For shame!

Problems with cancer screening are well-known.  For instance, a man is 48 times more likely to be harmed by prostate cancer screening (the PSA test) than to benefit from it.  He could end up getting surgery that leaves him incontinent and impotent.  The radiation treatments he endures could cause bowel problems.  He may have to use adult diapers for the rest of his life, and there’s a good chance that he won’t able to have sex even with Viagra.  All for nothing.  The American Cancer Society has recently stopped pushing the PSA test for this reason.  Hopefully, soon they will stop their shameful promotion of screening mammography as well.  

Please see http://www.screening.dk/folder_uk.pdf for accurate information on mammography.  

Below is some of eminent breast surgeon Dr. Michael Baum’s response to first article:

Since the publication of the paper on over-diagnosis of breast cancer at screening by Karsten Juhl Jorgensen and Peter C Gøtzsche in the BMJ this week, there has been a flurry of media activity with the high profile appearances of the usual apologists for the NHS breast-screening programme (NHSBSP). From this and previous excursions it is clear to me that the NHSBSP employs a PR machine against which individual clinical scientists such as myself have to compete. Surely as with the debate on chiropractics featured in the same issue, the correct response should be through scholarly disputation in the journals, rather than by sound bite.
To me the central issue in the debate is that the pro-screening lobby is locked into a mind set dating back to the late 1980s. Since then our understanding of the biology of breast cancer and its treatment has moved on whilst the screening programme continues without modification based on the results of trials reported up to 1987 and started more than 10 years of that date. As a result of this I can describe at least three problems that have to be addressed.
With the maturation of these old trials and subsequent overview analyses the estimates of benefits in terms of relative risk reductions in cause specific mortality have fallen from 25%, upon which the NHSBSP was predicated, to about 15%. [1]
Next, as described in Jørgensen and Gøtzsche’s paper, estimates of harm through over-diagnosis have increased. At the same time our understanding of the biology of breast cancer has improved so that the idea of latent or self limiting pathology that is so counter-intuitive to the screening community, is no longer surprising to those who have bothered to keep up to date.

Continues…