The American Cancer Society has issued new guidelines stating that fewer screenings for breast cancer are better than more. This is a 180-degree pivot for the organization.
Now, the ACS is recommending mammograms for women beginning at age 45 rather than 40, and saying that annual routine manual breast exams can be discarded. The ACS now says women 55 and older can transition to mammograms every other year.
As CNN.com tells us:
An exhaustive review of the medical literature shows these measures just aren’t very effective, according to the group. ‘The chance that you’re going to find a cancer and save a life is actually very small,’ said Dr. Otis Brawley, the society’s chief medical officer.
While mammograms save lives, they can also cause harm, and each group does a different job of balancing the pros and cons.
The problem with mammograms is that they have a relatively high false positive rate, which means women sometimes have to undergo painful and time-consuming tests only to find out they never had cancer in the first place.
The chances of false positives are especially high for women under 45, as they have denser breasts and tumors are harder to spot on an image. “If she starts screening at age 40, she increases the risk that she’ll need a breast cancer biopsy that turns out with the doctor saying ‘You don’t have cancer, so sorry we put you through all this,’” Brawley said.
All I can say is: Welcome to the party, ACS.
In March 2014 I told you about another study, published by the British Medical Journal, that showed annual mammograms do nothing to reduce mortality rates beyond that of “physical examination or usual care.”
In the study performed by Canadian researchers, 89,305 Canadian women aged 40-59 were enrolled and randomly assigned to one of two groups: one that receive mammograms and one that did not. During the study period that encompassed 25 years, 3,250 women receiving mammograms and 3,133 not receiving them were diagnosed with breast cancer. Of those 3,250 receiving mammograms, 500 died from breast cancer. Of those not receiving mammograms, 505 died from breast cancer.
I told you about more studies to this effect this past summer.
In others words, there is no significant difference in the death rates of women whether they receive mammograms or not.
Mammograms use ionizing radiation — known to cause cancer — to provide a radiological image of the breasts. But each mammogram a woman receives increases her risk of developing breast cancer by 1 percent.
A better method of imaging is thermography. It’s nontoxic and does not expose the breast to repeated doses of radiation. It’s what the ACS should recommend.
Urgent: Click for cancer-killing secrets — and more you doctor can’t tell you about!
To prevent breast cancer (and all cancers), women (everyone) should eat a healthy diet consisting primarily of organic and mostly raw vegetables and avoid genetically modified foods and those treated with pesticides. The quantities of meat — particularly red meat — consumed should be reduced; and any meat should be organic, from free-range animals not treated with antibiotics and hormones. And don’t forget to take a vitamin D3 supplement.
And don’t follow mainstream medicine as gospel — which has a for-profit motive in everything it does — without checking out alternative medicine sources. I have been writing about natural preventatives and cures for years in The Bob Livingston Letter™ and here, on Personal Liberty Digest®. These preventatives for breast cancer include green tea and mushrooms, proper levels of iodine, and proper levels of progesterone. All are effective at reducing the risk of breast cancer, and all are necessary for cure if breast cancer has been diagnosed.
