Tuesday, January 10, 2017

More Confusion

So a recent study shows that one third of all breast cancer diagnoses that are treated unnecessarily. I find this statistic a bit appalling.

First of all, we are all aware of the issues of over treatment for breast cancer and other ailments. Technology is advanced to the point that it can find little teeny tiny things that may or may not turn out to be nasty. Second of all, the standard these days is to treat all these potentially bad things as bad things because there is no way to know which are good and which are bad.

And that is my point. Since we don't know which ones are bad (i.e. potentially fatal) or not going to do anything bad, how did they come up with this statistic? That one-third of diagnoses are over treated.

The article cites a Danish study which showed an over treatment rate of 2.3%. The American College of Radiology also states the rate is there but definitely lower than what is cited in this new 'study'.

So this new 'study' is a piece of crap designed to scare the crap out of all of us breast cancer people. We are the ones that hear a 90% survival rate and convince ourselves we are in the 10% so of course we are all going to think that that we are in the one-third that was over treated.

I have one request: breast cancer research should be done to figure out what could be bad and what won't be.

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