Breast Cancer Screening: Is it doing more harm then good ?

Breast Cancer Screening which was once thought of as the major breakthrough in Breast Cancer Diagnosis has come under much scrutiny over the last few years.

In the attached video Sayer Ji who you may or may not know from ‘Greenmedinfo.com’ talks of this very issue and in fact how it may actually do more harm then good.

Mainstream academics are very quick to dismiss anything Sayer Ji talks of along with all other Scientists and Doctors who don’t work within the conventional health care industry labelling them as ‘Quacks’ – However this is generally down to their own inability to accept that what they have been indoctrinated to believe may actually be wrong – When you have spent your entire life studying towards something you are passionate about and go on to work within the medical industry to hear someone questioning everything you have ever been taught the usual reaction is to dismiss and condemn.

To backup what Sayer Ji is talking about there are now mainstream science articles and studies saying exactly the same thing:

British Medical Journal

Why cancer screening has never been shown to “save lives”—and what we can do about it [1]

Discussing how Cancer Screening does not reduce overall mortality rate in patients.

A Swiss study came to the same conclusions:

The graphs below represent the beliefs and realities of more than 1000 women aged 50+ in the US. The data in the first graph are derived from a survey of over 1000 women who were asked whether they believed that mammography would reduce breast cancer deaths by at least half. These women collectively  believed that of 1000 women who underwent mammography screening, 80 would die from breast cancer, while there would be 160 deaths in women who did not undergo screening.

The second graph shows the data from the study. The differences are shocking. In reality, of 1000 women who actually were screened, there were only 4 deaths from breast cancer. And in the group of women who were not screened, that number was only 5.

…hundreds of women have excessive testing, biopsies, lumpectomies, and even mastectomies for lesions found that were not and never would have been life- or health-threatening.

ACSH’s Dr. Gil Ross: “Over the course of the past five years, a veritable sea-change in the approach to reducing the toll of breast cancer has occurred. This is the result of large-scale evaluations, both retrospective and prospective, of the actual benefit vs. needless harms that result from routine screening mammography. While undoubtedly some potentially lethal cancers are found and excised thanks to such screenings, the small number of lives saved from breast cancer deaths are far outweighed by the human and economic toll of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In simplest terms, hundreds of women have excessive testing, biopsies, lumpectomies, and even mastectomies for lesions found that were not and never would have been life- or health-threatening. It is all but certain that some of these women were actually severely harmed or even killed by unnecessary interventions, but their stories will never be told on those TV benefits to ‘find the cure,’ nor on those pink-ribbon marches — yet the harms done are just as real, more so, than missing a low-grade malignancy on a screening mammography that was not done. The tough job will be convincing women, their loved ones, and even doctors that routine screening mammograms should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

So you have to ask why breast screening is still being done, could it be the fact that its economic worth is billions of dollars every year?

[1] BMJ.com