From Dr. Mercola
Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer for women in the U.S. Only lung cancer claims more women’s lives than breast cancer.
According to Cancer.org’s latest report,
Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2007-2008, 2007 ushered in more than 178,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer, and more than 40,000 women died from the disease.
But
men are by no means immune to breast cancer. Just over 2,000 men were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, and approximately 450 men died. Since routine screening for men is next to nonexistent, men are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease, and therefore
have poorer chances for survival.
Unfortunately, conventional medicine is stubbornly holding on to outmoded ideas of cancer detection and treatment, no matter how ineffective it’s been proven to be.
Mammography is a perfect example of this stubborn head-in-the-sand approach to cancer screening.
Education and awareness of better, less risky and more effective options for detecting breast cancer are woefully deficient, but they do exist, and it is my hope you will take the time to review this important information, whether you’re a man or a woman, and forward it widely to your family and friends.
The Case Against Mammography Health officials recommend that all women over 40 get a mammogram every one to two years, yet there is no solid evidence that mammograms save lives, and the benefits of mammograms are controversial at best.
Meanwhile, the health hazards of mammography have been well established.
John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D. – a nuclear physicist and a medical doctor, and one of the leading experts in the world on the dangers of radiation – presents compelling evidence in his book, Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease, that over
50 percent of the death-rate from cancer is in fact induced by x-rays.
Now consider the fact that the routine practice of taking four films of each breast annually results in approximately 1 rad (radiation absorbed dose) exposure, which is about 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray.
Even the American Cancer Society lists high-dose radiation to the chest as a medium to high risk factor for developing cancer.
How Mammography Increases Your Cancer Risk X-rays and other classes of ionizing radiation have been, for decades, a proven cause of virtually all types of biological mutations. When such mutations are not cell-lethal, they endure and accumulate with each additional exposure to x-rays or other ionizing radiation.
X-rays are also an established cause of genomic instability, often a characteristic of the most aggressive cancers.
Additionally, radiation risks are about four times greater for the 1 to 2 percent of women who are silent carriers of the A-T (ataxia-telangiectasia) gene, which by some estimates accounts for up to 20 percent of all breast cancers diagnosed annually.
When everything is taken into account, reducing exposure to medical radiation such as unnecessary mammograms would actually likely reduce mortality rates.
The practice of screening mammography itself poses significant and cumulative risks of breast cancer, especially for premenopausal women.
Making matters even worse, false positive diagnoses are very common – as high as 89 percent – leading many women to be unnecessarily and harmfully treated by mastectomy, more radiation, or chemotherapy.
There are instances where mammography may be warranted. But the fact remains that there are other technologies that are proven to be more effective, less expensive, and completely harmless, that can save far more lives.
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Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer for women in the U.S. Only lung cancer claims more women’s lives than breast cancer.
According to Cancer.org’s latest report, Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2007-2008, 2007 ushered in more than 178,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer, and more than 40,000 women died from the disease.
But men are by no means immune to breast cancer. Just over 2,000 men were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, and approximately 450 men died. Since routine screening for men is next to nonexistent, men are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease, and therefore have poorer chances for survival.
Unfortunately, conventional medicine is stubbornly holding on to outmoded ideas of cancer detection and treatment, no matter how ineffective it’s been proven to be.
Mammography is a perfect example of this stubborn head-in-the-sand approach to cancer screening.
Education and awareness of better, less risky and more effective options for detecting breast cancer are woefully deficient, but they do exist, and it is my hope you will take the time to review this important information, whether you’re a man or a woman, and forward it widely to your family and friends.
The Case Against Mammography
Health officials recommend that all women over 40 get a mammogram every one to two years, yet there is no solid evidence that mammograms save lives, and the benefits of mammograms are controversial at best.
Meanwhile, the health hazards of mammography have been well established.
John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D. – a nuclear physicist and a medical doctor, and one of the leading experts in the world on the dangers of radiation – presents compelling evidence in his book, Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease, that over 50 percent of the death-rate from cancer is in fact induced by x-rays.
Now consider the fact that the routine practice of taking four films of each breast annually results in approximately 1 rad (radiation absorbed dose) exposure, which is about 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray.
Even the American Cancer Society lists high-dose radiation to the chest as a medium to high risk factor for developing cancer.
How Mammography Increases Your Cancer Risk
X-rays and other classes of ionizing radiation have been, for decades, a proven cause of virtually all types of biological mutations. When such mutations are not cell-lethal, they endure and accumulate with each additional exposure to x-rays or other ionizing radiation.
X-rays are also an established cause of genomic instability, often a characteristic of the most aggressive cancers.
Additionally, radiation risks are about four times greater for the 1 to 2 percent of women who are silent carriers of the A-T (ataxia-telangiectasia) gene, which by some estimates accounts for up to 20 percent of all breast cancers diagnosed annually.
When everything is taken into account, reducing exposure to medical radiation such as unnecessary mammograms would actually likely reduce mortality rates.
The practice of screening mammography itself poses significant and cumulative risks of breast cancer, especially for premenopausal women.
Making matters even worse, false positive diagnoses are very common – as high as 89 percent – leading many women to be unnecessarily and harmfully treated by mastectomy, more radiation, or chemotherapy.
There are instances where mammography may be warranted. But the fact remains that there are other technologies that are proven to be more effective, less expensive, and completely harmless, that can save far more lives.