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Mammograms
October 16, 2016 - 8:14am
!!!
The men here are probably also aware of the same problem in terms of prostate cancer (which most often, but not always, occurs later in life).
Would anyone here be aware of what kind of screening programs are counselled in other countries, at what frequency and whom should they target?
I confess that onslaughts like pink cancer month, now followed by blue cancer month, don't strike me as the best kind of public health campaigns.
Did the researchers suggest that clinicians could have known which "30 of the 162 additional small tumors per 100,000 women that screening mammograms found would ever have progressed to a dangerous stage."?
I wonder how those 30 women feel about having wasted everyone's time like this.
It is very hard to know - the poiint is that even more women may have undergone unnecessary and mutilating treatment. This is not an anti-science movement like anti-vaxxing; it is professionals questioning a form of screening that has many negatives. I don't think there are any clear answers.
I'm not sure what to say, or even whether anything needs be said. But I will add:
CORRECT. This is the opposite: evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine owes us no more apology than logic does, or the triage protocol does.
That said, it is kind of a tough one. To "err on the side of caution" is to accept some number of false positives as the cost of doing business. It's not for me to say whether that's better or worse than erring on the side of conservative (or no) treatment.
Here's a somewhat amusing personal story. I've written here about my little health blip back in April. I went to the Emergency Room at Toronto Western complaining of a chest pain (that I was ready to write off as a muscle strain) and some incompatible neurological symptoms that I couldn't really explain. The on-call doctor asked a bunch of questions, did a few simple tests, and ordered a CT scan that showed conclusively what was wrong (and the rest is all detailed in another thread).
As part of my follow-up care, I now have a cardiologist, and when I described to him everything as it had played out, he replied "but how the hell did he catch that??".
I told him all that I knew: he had requested BP readings from both arms, he had done some simple tests, and he ordered a CT scan.
"But why did he order the scan??" my cardiologist asked. And then he basically went on to tell me that that ER doctor saved my life, and I owe him a fruit basket. So I guess I'm probably biased in favour of playing it safe.
Anyway, I've never had one of my moobs squished in an x-ray machine, so I'm not here to mansplain about mammograms.
I think you lucked into a doctor who not only knew his stuff, but had a rare gift of intuition. Which was even more important in the bad old days with far less clinical support.
I'd like to have more "haute vulgarisation" as is said in French, that is texts that are accessible to laypersons without being overly dumbed down. Fortunately, while IANAD, I have translated a fair number of human-med and vet documents, so I have a little more grounding than most laypeople.
You know, I don't have anything substantive to add, really. Just a cautionary note.
Watch out for that expression "evidence-based" XYZ. In many circumstances, it's cover for some very un-scientific claims. I can speak from experience in an un-named federal bureaucracy; the language of dominance and oppression is masked by pseudo-scientific claims that aren't challenged nearly enough.
Oh yeah. Health is a subject in which it becomes very clear that we need more women in public life, making decisions, etc., because, so far, we men have fucked up pretty badly on a number of issues.
The most glaring of which, and rather obviously, is women's health. It's been repeated over and over again, but, it bears repeating anyway. If men suffered cancer rates and deaths the way women suffer cancers, e.g., breast cancer, it would be properly treated as the epidemic that it is.
Women's cancers are a kind of canary in a coal mine. We live in a society that's killing us.
Literally.
Do women really get or die from cancers more than men?
0ne of the problems is that only the "sex-related" cancers are getting the pink and blue fundraising campaigns. Lung cancer still has a dismal survival rate, but people blame it on its victims - either smokers, or poor saps who worked in deadly jobs.
100% of people and other mammals die.
http://www.cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-101/cancer-statistics-...
While a smaller proportion of men work in lethal jobs like the asbestos industry than a couple of generations ago, those industrial homicides continue to exact a toll. Being feminists does not mean not caring about men's problems, it means challenging a system of inequality and dependency.