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Every year millions of women undergo mammographic screening as part of preventive breast cancer check-ups.
This is done by placing the breast between two plates, flattened like a pancake, and then X-rayed in order to detect emerging or growing tumors.
However, recently an increasing number of surgeons and other medical experts have voiced concerns and questioned this unpleasant and painful examination for women.
As they state, mammography actually does more harm than good to women.
What official medicine claims and what the real truth is
Official medicine claims that mammography is the only reliable way to detect breast cancer in time.
However, eight recent scientific studies that evaluated the procedure found that mammography is neither effective nor safe.
After evaluating data on 600,000 women aged 39 to 74 who regularly underwent mammography, the researchers concluded that many women were misdiagnosed.
Subsequently these women unnecessarily underwent chemotherapy, after which their health suddenly deteriorated. The conclusions of the study published in the Cochran database of scientific studies are that mammography causes more harm than benefit.
The reason is the fact that mammography leads to more women being misdiagnosed and consequently unnecessarily treated, even among those in whom malignant breast cancer is actually detected.
From this it follows that mammography as a screening method is outdated and therefore belongs more in the historical books of medical procedures that failed, and not in current medical practice.
As the study authors state:
“If we take into account that mammography reduces the breast cancer rate by 15%, but increases unnecessary chemotherapy treatment by 30%, then in concrete numbers it looks as follows.
For every 2,000 women invited for mammography over 10 years, 1 of them 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.
A team of scientists, which consisted of a medical ethicist, a clinical epidemiologist, pharmacologists, an oncologic surgeon, a caregiving researcher, 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 begin getting mammograms after age 50 during the next 10 years, one death is prevented, but 490 to 670 women will have a false positive result and 70 to 100 women will subsequently undergo unnecessary and risky biopsies.
In addition, 3 to 14 of these women will be diagnosed with breast cancer that is, however, benign and therefore will 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 ordinary breast self-examination.
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, 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 screening method is still used when it actually doesn’t work at all?
Dr. Sarah Mybill in the documentary film The Promise adds this:
“I believe that even if you did have a tumor, the last thing you would want to do is to firmly squeeze the breast between two plates, because that would only cause the cancer to spread even more.”
