Disease Proof : Disease Proof : Health & Nutrition News & Commentary : Dr. Joel Fuhrman

From the May 2004 edition of Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Times:

Unfortunately, mammography can be the cause of a woman’s breast cancer. When calculating its supposed benefits, we need to include in the equation the percentage of women whose breast cancer was promoted by the radiation exposure from the mammograms themselves. The younger you are when the mammograms are performed, the greater the risk of radiation-induced cancer.1,2 According to Michael Swift, M.D., chief of medical genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, between 5,000 and 10,000 of the 180,000 cases of breast cancer diagnosed each year could be prevented if women’s breasts were not exposed to radiation from mammograms.Over a million American women carry the gene for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T), which makes them unusually sensitive to the ionizing radiation in X rays and five times more likely to develop breast cancer.3

The decision to screen for breast cancer using mammograms should not be made lightly or based solely on emotions. Intuition, hope, and compassion can lead to the conclusion that screening mammograms should save the lives of young women, and it is frustrating that science has demonstrated otherwise. Our desire to help a loved one by “doing something about it” is instinctive. When it comes to breast cancer, the question is not whether to do something or not, but rather what to do about it. It is wrong to instruct patients to depend on mammograms, knowing that they will inevitably undergo the anxiety and frustration of repeated exams, callbacks, biopsies, and unneeded surgeries for nothing but a false sense of security. As caregivers, we need to tell our loved ones and all women that there are proven steps they can take to help prevent cancer from ever developing in the first place. (See Ten Ways to Help Prevent Breast Cancer.)

All the misleading publicity devoted to mammograms undercuts the urgently needed efforts to teach women that dietary and lifestyle changes are their best weapon in the fight against breast cancer. Women are continually urged by doctors, private and government agencies, and the media to undergo mammograms. How much better it would be if the same amount of effort would be put into telling women that those who eat four to five servings of vegetables per day have a 46 percent lower risk of breast cancer than those eating only one to two servings per day, and that women who eat six fruits per day have a 35 percent lower risk of breast cancer than those eating fewer than two fruits per day.4

For more on The Mammogram Debate check out these posts:

• On the Ship of False Hope
• Multibillion Dollar Industry
• A Campaign of Fear
• Myth of "Early Detection"
• Facts vs. Vested Interests

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (2)
• Share Link

From the May 2004 edition of Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Times:

The business of medicine is rarely deterred by facts. The findings of the Danish researchers did nothing to change the position of the American Cancer Society, The American College of Radiology, and the National Cancer Institute. These institutions still support the discredited notion that mammograms “prevent” breast cancer. Mammograms are entrenched in the practice of conventional medicine. The politics and economics within the world of medical policy-making govern the messages that are disseminated to the public. The fact is—at best—mammograms detect, they do not prevent. To use the word prevent in the same sentence as mammograms is a tremendous distortion of reality. The only proven approach to prevention of breast cancer is the adoption of lifestyle modifications that help stop cells from becoming cancerous in the first place.

Controversies in the medical literature rarely reach the public. In the case of mammography, doctors almost never admit to patients that the benefits from mammograms, if any, are marginal at best. This does not mean that some women will not be diagnosed with breast cancer early enough to have a curative lumpectomy. For that woman, the mammogram will have extended her life. However, for every woman whose life is extended, there are almost an equal number who would have lived longer had their breast cancer not been discovered and treated. For those women, the medical treatments will shorten, not lengthen their lives.

For more on The Mammogram Debate check out these posts:

• On the Ship of False Hope
• Multibillion Dollar Industry
• A Campaign of Fear
• Myth of "Early Detection"
• Cause or Cure?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Share Link

From the May 2004 edition of Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Times:

On the ship of false hope Mammograms in all age groups are a very poor screening tool. About 5 percent of mammograms are abnormal or suspicious, and of these 80 to 93 percent are false positives that cause unnecessary anxiety and further procedures, including surgery. If that were not enough to question the reliability of mammograms as a diagnostic tool, consider the unfounded reassurance that results from the false negatives that occur in 10 to 15 percent of women who already have breast cancer that will manifest clinically within one year.

In the October 2001 issue of The Lancet, the Nordic Cochrane Centre of Denmark published a follow-up report on its groundbreaking 2000 analysis of the efficacy of screening mammograms in reducing breast cancer death.1 The new report confirmed the earlier findings. After reviewing the seven largest mammography-screening trials, no benefit attributable to mammograms was found for any age group. The new research focused on the ability of mammograms to reduce total mortality because, as stated by the report’s authors, this is the only “reliable” measure of benefit.2

The Danish researchers found numerous flaws in the mammography-screening trials. They found that the studies under review did not tally fatal cases that were misclassified or that were triggered by cancer treatment such as radiotherapy. For example, none of the leukemia deaths and cardiac deaths occurring as a result of chemotherapy for breast cancer and none of the increased cases of fatal lung cancer caused by radiation to the breast during diagnosis and treatment were ever considered in prior studies. Lung cancer is a known late-stage side effect to breast cancer radiation,3 and congestive heart failure is a known late side effect of the cardiac toxicity of chemotherapy.4 The Cochrane researchers found that the studies’ claims that mammograms reduce breast cancer deaths by 25 to 30 percent were invalid, since those investigators did not consider all other deaths related to breast cancer treatments.

The researchers also found that the studies that claimed to show some benefit from mammograms for women in their fifties and sixties were 1) biased in favor of screening and 2) incorrect because they only looked at breast cancer mortality, not all-cause mortality. Based on this highly respected review, The Lancet editors concluded, “There is no reliable evidence from large randomized trials to support screening mammography at any age.”

The recent reassessment of the 2000 Cochrane analysis also confirmed that breast cancer screening with mammograms creates an overuse of aggressive treatments. The authors reasoned that the mammograms detect lots of slow-growing tumors that will never progress to cancer within the patient’s lifetime and classify these as cancer. These account for the mammograms’ so-called “successes.” There are cellular changes that may be histologically cancerous but biologically benign. Carcinoma-in-situ may be treated by bilateral mastectomy even though they do not progress to invasive disease—ever. The flawed studies count these as mammogram successes, when they are not. At the same time, the cancers that are truly invasive are not really caught early enough to make a difference. The patient only appears to live longer because the disease is diagnosed earlier. As stated previously, the same percentage of women are dying at the same ages they were before the widespread use of mammograms. The inescapable conclusion drawn from these carefully performed investigations is that mammograms do not provide a survival benefit in any age group. Those who benefit are balanced out almost equally by those who are hurt.

For more on The Mammogram Debate check out these posts:

• Multibillion Dollar Industry
• A Campaign of Fear
• Myth of "Early Detection"
• Facts vs. Vested Interests
• Cause or Cure?

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Share Link

From the May 2004 edition of Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Times:

Mammograms have been positioned as the centerpiece of women’s health care, and they are the most prevalent “medicine” delivered to our female population. Women shuffle from their doctors to radiologists and back, and if their mammograms show abnormalities, they are transferred to surgeons for needle biopsies and excisional biopsies. Today’s woman goes to doctors to get yearly mammograms and breast exams with little thought given to the medical literature on these subjects and the shocking facts it reveals. Suffice to say, gynecologists whose practices revolve around giving postmenopausal women estrogen replacement therapy (a disproved and dangerous practice) and ordering mammograms will have little left to do if women become better informed about the risks associated with mammograms.

Mammograms help detect breast cancer, and they help detect it earlier than other diagnostic tools. But in the process, they cause a lot of fear and result in countless unnecessary breast biopsies. In order to uncover cancer and not give false reassurance, radiologists are forced to advise biopsies even when the findings suggest the chance of cancer is small. More than 80 percent of all breast biopsies are negative for cancer.1 In addition, these mammograms with false positive results (sent for biopsy and then found to be negative) occur most frequently in the forty to fifty age range. By the time a woman has nine mammograms between the ages of forty and forty-nine, her chance of having a false positive result that requires her to have a biopsy is 43 percent.2 Nearly half of all women getting mammograms are eventually sent for biopsies to evaluate “suspicious” findings. When a woman with risk factors (such as a family history of breast cancer) gets nine or ten mammograms between ages thirty-five and fifty, her chance of the radiologist finding something suspicious and sending her to get a biopsy that returns negative for cancer rises to 98 percent.

The problems caused by false positives and unnecessary biopsies might be acceptable if the increased use of mammograms saved women’s lives. But it does not appear from the statistics that many lives are being saved by this so-called “early detection.”

Between 1970 and 1990, as more and more women got mammograms at the urging of the medical profession and health authorities, breast cancer rates rose 24 percent. As expected, more cancers were being detected, and they were being detected “earlier.” Five- and ten-year survival rates improved, and it appeared that women were living longer with their cancers. But those figures were misleading. Sadly, the exact same percentage of women still died of breast cancer at the same age as they did prior to the widespread use of mammograms. (See chart below.) Increased use of mammography has accomplished little more than giving an increasing number of women the painful knowledge that they have breast cancer.



For more on The Mammogram Debate check out these posts:

• On the Ship of False Hope
• A Campaign of Fear
• Myth of "Early Detection"
• Facts vs. Vested Interests
• Cause or Cure?

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Share Link

From the May 2004 edition of Dr. Fuhrman's Healthy Times:

More than a decade ago, the American Cancer Society recommended that women get a baseline mammogram at age thirty-five, followed by annual screenings beginning at age forty. The campaign to position mammograms as the key weapon in the fight against breast cancer was initiated by the American Cancer Society, with a number of medical groups joining the fray. Instilling fear about breast cancer was a campaign strategy. To achieve this, the American Cancer Society used greatly exaggerated numbers and faulty math to overstate breast cancer risk. They admitted they did this—and continue to do it—to promote mammograms.1 They still trumpet the claim that women face a one-in-eight chance of developing breast cancer during their lifetimes.

Where does this one-in-eight figure come from? It is a cumulative probability derived from adding up all the chances a woman has of developing breast cancer between birth and age 110. Since women do not generally live that long, this figure is not based on reality. More sophisticated risk assessment gives the actual risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer before age sixty as about one in 500. Even women in their eighties do not face a one-in-eight chance of developing breast cancer. For example, at the age of seventy, the risk of developing breast cancer during the next ten years is one in twenty-three. In their zeal to help women, the American Cancer Society and other groups have created an epidemic of fear. Unfortunately, that fear has not been used to direct women to prevent breast cancer—by avoiding the causes of breast cancer. Rather, it has been used to convince women to think that using mammograms to find cancer after it already has developed is their best hope for survival.

For more on The Mammogram Debate check out these posts:

• On the Ship of False Hope
• Multibillion Dollar Industry
• Myth of "Early Detection"
• Facts vs. Vested Interests
• Cause or Cure?

Continue Reading...

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (2)
• Share Link