Over the years I’ve written about women’s breasts (boobs) in various capacities, from the hazards of nipple piercing, to the cancer risks caused by brassieres, and the monstrosity of mammograms. The latter I called “A Crime Against Women”, echoing the words of Sam Epstein, M.D., professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health.
Large or small breasts, women all have about the same amount of milk-making tackle!
Women have been sold, by lying phoney medical pseuds, on the idea that mammograms are “caring” for women. That such investigations are advanced science, the best you can get, and will help with survival from breast cancer.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This unpleasant investigation is nothing more than a selling scam, designed to drum up business for the radiologists and oncologists.
The woman gets nothing, except sometimes an early death. This is well laid out in study figures and the literature.
Screening mammograms do not reduce death from breast cancer. There is no reliable evidence that having a screening mammogram reduces death by breast cancer on a population basis… Meaning, overall, THERE IS NO BENEFIT. The Cochrane Collaboration reached this conclusion in 2017 after taking a good look at the original randomized trials.1
But doctors, bless ‘em, just continue to lie through their teeth and say, “science proves this test is valuable.” It’s not just brazen, it’s CRIMINAL.
But that’s not the only problem: Routine mammograms over-diagnose cancer…
The Cochrane Collaboration also reported on harms associated with mammography screening. The most important of these is over-diagnosis. That is, the diagnosis of breast cancers in healthy women that would never have become clinically detectable without screening or would have caused harm to the woman in any way.
Estimates of over-diagnosis vary from 30 per cent in the Cochrane Collaboration 2013 report to 55 per cent in the 2016 update from the Canadian trial and 54 per cent by the United States National Cancer Institute.
Women with over-diagnosed breast cancer receive all the usual deadly and unnecessary breast cancer treatments including lumpectomy, mastectomy, radiation and hormonal therapy. All treatment for over-diagnosed cancer is harmful—because it isn’t needed.
Then, of course, there are false positives. LOTS of false positives, which is great for the doctors (additional free income!), but a terrifying and unnecessary ordeal for the woman. She is told has has cancer when she doesn’t. Think of the emotional crisis. Some women may even try to do themselves a harm. But there is nothing at all wrong.
Don’t Trust The Web
Of course if you go Googling for the topic, you’ll get all the lies thrust at you, and that serves you right.
You CANNOT trust what you read on the Web. The big players, the major liars with all the money, fill up pages and pages of re-assuring pap. Over and over they down play the risks and do not give a balanced view, even though they pretend to (Susan G Komen website). Don’t be fooled by charities, which are the LAST thing to trust: they are being paid big fat salaries out of donations and they will avoid the truth at all costs.
Most people believe the propaganda line, that breast cancer is inevitably a progressive disease that will kill you if you don’t remove it in time. We call it the “arrow of cancer”. According to this idea, every big cancer is harmful, every small one is still a growing risk, but that every cancer is curable if only you catch it in time. It’s an appealing idea — except that a growing body of research suggests that it’s wrong.
Honest scientists now know that breast cancers can behave in different ways. The disease falls into three general behavioral categories, according to Barnett Kramer, director of the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Prevention. Kramer refers to the three types as turtles, birds and bears.
I like this model! Turtles are cancers that progress so slowly that they will never metastasize or harm you. Finding these cancers early won’t save your life, because they never endangered it in the first place, Kramer says.
Birds, on the other hand, are extremely aggressive cancers that are programmed to become deadly very quickly. These cancers aren’t helped by mammography, either, because they spread before they can be detected on a mammogram.
So only a small percentage of women (those with bears) could possibly be helped by a mammogram. Bears may eventually kill you (not always) if they’re not treated, but they spread slowly enough that a mammogram can detect them in time to make a difference.2
Those with turtles end up getting treated for cancers that were never destined to cause any harm. Women who have such cancers are grateful because they believe their lives have been saved. Their doctors and radiologists become even more convinced that mammography saves lives. In fact, these women are victims of over-diagnosis and unnecessary treatment.
The trouble is, we don’t have a reliable way to distinguish these different “species” of cancer: turtles, birds and bears. While scientists are working to find genetic markers that predict how a cancer will behave, right now the only way to know which way a cancer will act is to wait and see what it does.
Surprisingly, this “wait and see” approach has thrown up something astonishing: if you do NOTHING AT ALL, many breast cancers simply go away. Yes, about 20% just disappear!
A pivotal study, from Norway, was published in The Archives of Internal Medicine (Dec 2008), and it suggests that even invasive breast cancers may sometimes go away without treatment and in larger numbers than anyone ever believed.
So wait-and-see is a good option, right? We should adopt it, right? It hasn’t made the slightest difference. Surgeons and oncologists go on slashing and poisoning, even when it is not necessary. Well, how are the poor doctors going to get rich unless they do?
Ignorance Is Not Bliss
Whoever said ignorance is bliss was a fool. I’m clever and I say something totally the opposite: THE COMMONEST CAUSE OF DEATH IS IGNORANCE. Not knowing something you oughta know!
This is not a situation of “What the hell, let them cut it out, it’s safer that way…” Listen, people DIE of medical treatments. All the time. You can’t afford to know nothing, when these are your breasts and it’s your life.
So with great pleasure, I am introducing you to the work of my friend Megan S Smith, who has put together an investigative video called “bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts”. It’s riveting.
I’m not in this breast series. But Megan did come to my home a few years back, where she filmed me being interviewed.
A good place to start would be the movie trailer on YouTube, here.
In “bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts,” doctors disclose how mammograms affect the lives of women through radiation-induced cancer, trauma-generated metastases, and unnecessary treatments such as mastectomies — and how the self-interests of industry and conflicts of interest in medical research have kept the safer screening tests of thermography and ultrasound from wider use.
To read more of Megan’s shocking revelations, go to her website.
And if you need help because you or a loved one is fighting breast cancer, read my book about holistic alternatives.
Stay well, please!
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
References:
1. [https://theconversation.com/routine-mammograms-do-not-save-lives-the-research-is-clear-84110#]
2. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/im-just-saying-no-to-mammography-why-the-numbers-are-in-my-favor/2013/10/07/733c0894-29e1-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html]