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Every year millions of women undergo mammographic examinations as part of preventive breast cancer screenings.
This is done by placing the breast between two plates, flattened like a pancake, and then X-rayed in order to detect developing or growing tumors.
Recently, however, an increasing number of surgeons and other medical experts have spoken out and questioned this unpleasant and painful examination for women.
As they state, mammography actually harms women more than it helps.
What official medicine claims and what the real truth is
Official medicine claims that mammography is the only reliable way to detect breast cancer early.
However, eight recent scientific studies that evaluated this procedure found that mammography is neither effective nor safe.
After evaluating data on 600,000 women aged 39 to 74 who regularly underwent mammography, researchers concluded that many women were misdiagnosed.
Consequently these women unnecessarily underwent chemotherapy, after which their health suddenly deteriorated. The conclusions of the study published in the Cochrane database of scientific studies are that mammography causes more harm than benefit.
The reason is that after mammography more women are misdiagnosed and consequently unnecessarily treated, including among those in whom malignant breast cancer is actually detected.
It follows that mammography as an examination method is outdated and therefore belongs more in the historical books of medical procedures that failed, rather than in current medical practice.
As the authors of the study state:
“If we take into account that mammography reduces the rate of breast cancer by 15%, but increases unnecessary chemotherapy treatment by 30%, then in concrete numbers it looks as follows.
For every 2,000 women invited to mammography over 10 years, 1 will not die from breast cancer, but 10 healthy women will be unnecessarily treated with chemotherapy.”
A group of prestigious medical experts admit that mammography harms more than it helps
A year after the first study on mammography was published, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reached similar conclusions.
The team of scientists, which consisted of a medical ethicist, a clinical epidemiologist, pharmacologists, an oncologic surgeon, a care scientist, a lawyer and a health economist, declared that the official medical claims about the benefits of mammography are actually complete nonsense.
They found that for every 1,000 women who start getting mammograms after age 50 during the next 10 years, 1 death is prevented, but 490 to 670 women will have a false positive result and 70 to 100 women will subsequently undergo an unnecessary and risky biopsy.
Furthermore, 3 to 14 of these women will be diagnosed with breast cancer that is, however, non-malignant and will therefore unnecessarily undergo body-destroying chemotherapy, thereby permanently damaging their health.
Another study conducted in Canada in 2014 concluded that mammographic examinations do not reduce cancer mortality any more than simple self-examination of the breast.
In other words, mammography as a screening procedure is completely unnecessary and in many cases even harmful.
And the list of research with similar results continues – Norway, the USA, Switzerland and many other countries. They all agree that mammography is not what it is presented to be.
A statistical analysis of 40 years of mammography use in the USA shows that more women are incorrectly diagnosed with breast cancer because of mammography than those whose disease was actually detected early.
Conclusion
All this brings us to the question of why this examination method is still used when it actually doesn’t work at all?
Dr. Sarah Mybill adds to this in the documentary The Promise:
“I believe that even if you did have a tumor, the last thing you would want to do is firmly squeeze the breast between two plates, because that would only cause the cancer to spread even more.”
