Avoid Mammograms like the Plague

The bottom line is that this tech was sold on the basis of a plausible advantage and it now turns out that the original work that supported this was not so much wrong as optimistic.  The meta stats tell us it is no help at all.

Yet it took many years of data to prove this.

Many of our protocols that we rely on will fail the same test and history is littered with formally popular systems long since abandoned as ineffective.

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Avoid Mammograms like the Plague

Published on December 8, 2017

http://drsircus.com/general/avoid-mammograms-like-plague/?

The truth is mammograms just don’t work. Mammograms are dangerous hurting women more than helping them yet doctors and their parent organizations just don’t want to get the message. Their excuse for using cancer forming radiation has been that prevention is the best medicine when it comes to cancer. They have been thinking that picking up early signs of disease is the best way to prevent cancer from taking root, so doctors have urged people get screened for all types of cancer on a regular basis.

The assumption is that screening will save them from developing advanced cancer, which is less treatable and deadlier. They have been wrong, meaning a lot of women have died because oncologists really know nothing about prevention. However society expects that we should respect them but unfortunately, in the process, we can only lose respect for ourselves and worse than that, witness the death or misery of loved ones.

The real question everyone should be asking is, “Why look for breast cancer with a test that can actually cause breast cancer?” By some estimates, up to 20% of all breast cancers diagnosed in the United States annually are actually caused by the cumulative radiation effects of mammograms.

A new study published in BMJ, researchers show that mammography does little to reduce either deaths or advanced breast cancer over a period of 23 years in a Netherlands study. Instead, they found that the X-ray based test designed to pick up tumors led to over diagnoses 60% of the time.

The study involved all Dutch women who were screened with mammograms every other year between 1989 and 2012—about 8 million women in all. The researchers, led by Dr. Philippe Autier from the University of Strathclyde Institute of Global Public Health sustains what many doctors have been saying for years.

Mammography does not pick up tumors but rather the changed breast tissue surrounding tumors; it’s possible that many advanced cancers are growing without significantly changing breast tissue, and therefore not getting picked up by mammograms. At the same time each mammogram increases the chances of contracting cancer because of the radiation.

X-rays cause cancer. This is and accepted it’s not controversial. Those painless, invisible rays that doctors aim at your chest or a broken bone or an arthritic joint are dangerous. That doctor or dentist is pointing a death ray right at you or your child and they have their reasons and habits that justify the whole experience. [3]

Medical radiation, received even at very low doses, is an important  cause of death from Ischemic Heart Disease; the probable mechanism is radiation-induction of mutations in the coronary arteries, resulting in dysfunctional clones (mini-tumors) of smooth muscle cells.

– Dr. John W. Gofman

The findings support a growing number of other population-based studies from the U.S., Australia, and Norway that have also shown that since mammograms were recommended in the 1970s, rates of advanced breast cancer have not dropped dramatically.

“I don’t think the accumulating data shows that continuing mammography screening is a good solution,” says Autier, “essentially because the price to pay by women in terms of over diagnosis is enormous.” Previous studies have documented that over diagnosis of breast cancer can lead to additional biopsies and even treatments that expose women to side effects including increased incidences of cancer.

Dr. Russell Blaylock is warning women about the orthodox ontological approach including its use of mammograms because they are dangerous and cancer provoking from the radiation being used. Most women depend upon that yearly mammogram to warn them of possible breast cancer. Yet, as Dr. Blaylock points out, studies show mammograms actually increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer from 1-3% per year, depending on the technique used. Now that may not sound like a lot. However, if you religiously undergo a mammogram every year for 10 years, you increase your risk from 10-30% (and some radiation experts feel the danger is much higher than that).

Another major problem with mammograms is the compression factor. This sometimes painful aspect of mammograms risks the spread of any breast cancer that may be present. This from Dr. Samuel Epstein, one of the world’s top cancer experts:

As early as 1928, physicians were warned to handle “cancerous breasts with care– for fear of accidentally disseminating cells” and spreading cancer. Nevertheless, mammography entails tight and often painful compression of the breast, particularly in premenopausal women. This may lead to distant and lethal spread of malignant cells by rupturing small blood vessels in or around small, as yet undetected breast cancers.

Dr. David Brownstein says, “Unfortunately, screening mammograms, used for nearly 30 years, have never been shown to alter breast cancer mortality. And, to make matters worse, mammography exposes sensitive tissue to ionizing radiation which actually causes cancer. In fact, it is estimated that each mammogram increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer by 1%. After 10 years of mammograms, a woman’s risk may increase by 10%.”

Babies born of mothers who had a series of X-rays of the pelvic region during pregnancy were nearly twice as likely to develop leukemia or another form of cancers those born of mothers who had not been X-rayed.

Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, former professor of radiation physics at the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine, in his book Secret Fallout – Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three-Mile Island, indicated that the risk increased with each additional picture, as the studies of Stewart similarly indicated. This clearly implied that there was no significant healing of the damage and that the cancer-causing effects of radiation were cumulative. This would mean that the effects of a dose received over a period of time from fallout would be similar to those from an equal dose received all at once from X-rays. Even worse was the realization that children whose mothers were X-rayed during the first trimester of their pregnancy were found to be ten times more likely to develop cancer than those whose mothers were X-rayed toward the end of pregnancy.

A Norwegian study[1] found that breast cancer screening, commonly known as mammogram screening, may reduce the risk of death from breast cancer by only 10 percent. Mette Kalager, M.D. and colleagues followed 40,075 women, screened and unscreened from 1996 through 2005. The findings were reported on Sept 23, 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is not the only study suggesting that the life-saving effect of this screening method is quite limited.

Jørgensen KJ and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark conducted a study suggesting that the benefit may be zero. The researchers found women ages 44 to 74 who had received mammogram screening had their risk of death from the disease reduced by 1 percent, compared to 2 percent reduction in the women who were unscreened. Similarly, no benefit was found in women aged 35 to 55 and those aged 75 to 84. The findings were reported in the March 23, 2010 issue of British Medical Journal.[2]

Massive campaigns exist to encourage women to have annual mammograms. However, routine screening has not been proven to reduce the death toll from cancer. Americans spend an estimated $4 billion annually on mammograms, according to Dr. David H. Newman, author of the book “Hippocrates’ Shadow: Secrets from the House of Medicine.” Some of those tests cause false alarms that lead to unnecessary follow-up surgery on normal breasts, at a cost of $14 billion to $70 billion over a decade, according to Newman, the director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan.

There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad.

Dr. Ned Calonge

Chairman US Preventive Services

More breast tissue is exposed to dangerous cancer causing radiation each year. This yearly ritual generates false positive and false negative results leading to many worthless operations and considerable anxiety in women incorrectly diagnosed. Biopsies are often done to evaluate breast masses. Needle biopsies are considered less invasive and safer than common breast biopsies of suspected tumors but even this procedure can spread small foci of tumor along the needle track potentially increasing the spread of tumor cells.

Many women will be over-diagnosed by both two and three dimensional mammograms leading to overtreatment. One of the most basic reasons why mammograms do not demonstrate affectively higher survival rates is that the test is negatively reinforcing in that women are exposed to cancer provoking treatments and even more cancer provoking tests that lead to higher incidence of death, not from the cancer itself but from the treatments and dangerous tests.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first mammography device that generates 3-D images of the breast, potentially helping doctors to spot more cancerous tumors. The FDA says the new system doubles the radiation exposure for patients, but also increases the accuracy of diagnosis. Roughly 37 million women each year have a mammogram to check for signs of breast cancer even though every physician knows that radiation exposure increases ones risk for cancer. Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women and is the second leading cause of cancer death in women (after lung cancer). The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2005, about 211,240 women were diagnosed with breast cancer — and 40,410 died from the disease.

The medical establishment throws caution to the wind and subjects people to higher and higher levels of radiation with their obsession with medical testing. The late Dr. John W. Gofman, former Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that about three-quarters of all breast cancer cases in the United States are induced by radiation — including medical X-rays, and including mammograms to detect breast cancer.

And about half of all people with cancer are treated with radiation therapy, either alone or in combination with other types of cancer treatment. Radiation therapy uses ionizing radiation to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Unfortunately it can kill you.

According to the Times, “Americans today receive far more medical radiation than ever before. The average lifetime dose of diagnostic radiation has increased sevenfold since 1980, and more than half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy.”

CT scans of the abdomen can deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest X-rays.[5] An estimated 70 million CT (for computed tomography) scans are performed in the United States every year, up from three million in the early 1980s, and at least 29,000 cases of cancer and 14,500 deaths in the United States every year, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Safely Diagnosing Breast Cancer

Women are beginning to embrace Breast Thermography because it is 100% safe & non-invasive early screening option along with lymphatic therapy to assist with reversing toxic symptoms in their breasts. Breast thermography can screen for indications of breast disease up to ten years before a mammogram, at the cell stage, when we can still halt and reverse indications of disease holistically. Thermal imaging reads abnormal heat generated by new blood vessel growth in the area of tumors as well as heat generated from other abnormalities that need not be cancer such as lymph congestion, fibrocystic symptoms and oestrogen dominance.