The Case Against The Case Against Mammography
The overdiagnosis campaign reflects a lack of respect for women’s capacity to act rationally upon receiving an abnormal test result.
writer, health care advocate, physician
The overdiagnosis campaign reflects a lack of respect for women’s capacity to act rationally upon receiving an abnormal test result.
The potential to reduce overtreatment, in women with a low chance of recurrence for which chemo is unlikely to be of benefit, is huge.
These biomarkers should link patients to optimal therapy (when such exists), and lead some to decline therapy that’s unlikely to help. The CDx field is moving forward rapidly in oncology..
DCIS accounts for approximately 1 in 5 breast cancer-ish diagnoses in the United States. The practical problem with DCIS is that most oncologists, surgical and medical, will admit they’re not sure what to do about it.
If overtreatment is the problem, the solution is not by avoidance of breast cancer detection, but by better education of physicians and patients.
The statistical assault on breast cancer screening continues. JAMA Internal Medicine has published another analysis…
A new study sheds light on social and economic factors that influence whether women with breast cancer get lumpectomy or mastectomy.
By telling her story, she helps break the mystery and stigma that deter honest and needed discussion about cancer-causing, inherited genetic mutations.
Women have every right to know if they have dense breasts and if they’re at increased risk for a hidden tumor.
Most women do well, for many years, after the smallest surgery possible to remove an invasive breast tumor. But the decision isn’t easy.
Last week, a panel convened by the FDA deliberated over the risks and benefits of using power morcellators in gynecological surgery. In April, the agency issued an alert cautioning providers that the tools could spread malignant cells from an occult malignancy.
I used to think that physicians shouldn’t talk about money with their patients. That sort of conversation has the potential to render doctors’ work like an ordinary business transaction.
This new JAMA article reviews the literature. At a glance, it may add to the growing perception among journalists, primary care physicians and others – including ordinary women – that mammography’s effectiveness has been, again, disproved.
What’s great about this piece, and what’s wrong about it, is that it comes from an individual woman.
This kind of paternalism, when a doctor assesses the risks and benefits, and spares the patient’s “knowing” seems anachronistic. But it may, still, be what many people are looking for when and if they get a serious illness.
Pills, liquid, or powder with no treatment value can be harmful to the doctor-patient relationship, which is predicated on a mutual trust, some say.
The medical word of the month is a most definite “no.”
It was sometime in April, 1988. I was putting a line in an old man with end-stage kidney disease, cancer (maybe), heart failure, bacteria in his blood and no consciousness. Prince was on the radio, loud, by his bedside. If you could call it that…