Mammograms cause 7,000 women to receive false positives each year in the UKExperts from the Nordic Cochrane Centre (NCC) in the U.K. have estimated that about 7,000 British women are improperly diagnosed for breast cancer each year because of mammography. The group is urging the National Health Service (NHS) to reevaluate its breast cancer screening program, citing a failure of mammography to properly diagnose patients.
Controversy over the legitimacy of mammography has been heating up worldwide as increasing numbers of medical professionals, industry watchdogs, consumer advocates, and others are recognizing that mammography is failing to achieve what it was intended to do. Not only does it improperly detect cancer cells, but it often subjects women to needless treatments that end up causing them more harm than good.
Official British mammography rhetoric claims that 1,400 deaths are prevented every year from mammography screenings, however there is no evidence to back up this claim. The NCC article, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine explains that many of the claims made by the NHS about its screening program are not backed up by evidence.
Take, for instance, the fact that mortality rates from breast cancer were steadily dropping before the screening program was implemented in the late 1980s. Even amongst women too young for screenings, a reduction in breast cancer deaths was taking place, indicating that the screening program had nothing to do with it.
On the contrary, mammography screening often misdiagnoses women with cancer, causing them to undergo dangerous treatments like chemotherapy, radiation, and biopsy surgery which end up taking a big toll on their bodies. The screenings themselves also inflict routine doses of toxic radiation that can encourage the growth and spread of malignant cancer cells, defeating the point.
Representatives from NHS were quick to defend the screening process, claiming that critics are not properly interpreting data and statistics concerning breast cancer mortality rates. According to them, women who are screened have a 35 percent less chance of dying from breast cancer.
It is difficult to pinpoint just how many women get breast cancer from screenings. There are also no statistics on how many women die from chemotherapy and radiation treatments that they did not actually need or for cancers that they would not have gotten would they not have been screened. One thing is for sure; the cancer industry continues to insist that mammography screening is safe and effective at preventing breast cancer deaths, despite evidence that indicates otherwise.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7019952/Breast-cancer-screening-benefits-questioned.html
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