Leslie's posts & Health Leslie on 22 May 2007 03:19 pm
Smart Women and Cancer and Mammograms
Susan Reimer’s column in The Sunpapers this morning gave lots of reasons why women delay having a mammogram. Read all of that faulty thinking and dangerous logic here.
I won’t rant, or go into what Kerch calls “the full Leslie.” I will however say that there are really only two reasons why smart women don’t get regular mammograms: Fear and Stupidity.
Ms. Reimer ultimately posits that money and pain are the chief reasons why women don’t get regular mammos. To which I say: having a baby was expensive and giving birth hurt, but we did that. Isn’t your own life worth the same?
Clearly I feel very strongly about this, given that I am a breast cancer survivor since 2000 and my early stage cancer was detected by a mammogram. I was 46 (which is “young” by breast cancer standards). And while we’re on the subject, colonoscopies fall into the same category.
If you’re smart and you want to live, you do what you can, right?
Just do it. Now.
on 08 Jun 2007 at 3:17 pm 1.Betsy said …
Leslie wrote:
“…there are really only two reasons why smart women don’t get regular mammograms: Fear and Stupidity.”
Not to be oppositional, but I beg to differ. There is a significant body of scientific inquiry (which I can maybe find, though with effort, because I am a person who reads from multiple souces, winnows out what is most sensible and goes with that, usually forgetting where I read it and why I was persuaded; but for this it may be well worth that effort) which demonstrates certain risks of mammograms, not the least of which is that very small tumors, which might well remain so, can, by the pressing activity of the mammograohy, be caused to open and spread throughout the body, resulting in — guess what — cancer.
I have also the understanding (and could find my sources) that the real statistics on actual deahs from breast cancer with regular mamograms is very little improvement over those for women who have undergone regular mammograms.
And finally, ultrasound breast exams, rarely obtainable, are both more accurate and less risky.
on 14 Jun 2007 at 6:39 am 2.Leslie said …
Differing with my position is fine. Just know that since I am alive and cancer-free today because of a routine mammogram, I’ll never cede the point that mammograms are a crucial early detection screening for breast cancer.
In the larger sense, doing something to detect breast cancer - be it mammo or ultrasound or something else - is infinitely better than doing nothing and waiting until you feel a lump while you’re in the shower. Unless, of course, you want your choices for treatment, surgery, disfigurement and scarring to be limited.
An excellent discussion of Mammography appears in “the bible for women with breast cancer” (NYT): DR. SUSAN LOVE’S BREAST BOOK by Susan M. Love, M.D. I cite pg 319 - 323 in the Third Edition, 2000.