NBC's Snyderman: "These new [mammogram] recommendations ... are just that -- they're recommendations"
November 18, 2009 12:51 pm ET
From the November 17 edition of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams:
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It's not.
It's more dangerous for women 40-49 to get lots of radiation and unneeded biopsies than it is to find a few cancers.
For the women who might find cancers, of course it's better to find the cancers. But should we make the health outcomes of the women who don't have cancer WORSE? The risk of breast cancer in women 40-49 is 1 in 69.
Should we endanger 68 women to find cancer in one?
Medical professionals, looking at the risks versus the rewards, looking at a cost/benefit analysis, say no, we shouldn't.
Making decisions like that, based upon the best medical evidence, isn't rationing.
The rightwing will analyse ever hiccup in a news cycle to find a new talking point to hit the administration with. The only consistant message I can discern in the avalanche of their talking points is that Americans must not pay any attention to any experts or peer reviewed scientific studies or any information that has not been approved as consistant with the right wing's political agenda. That agenda is the litmus test for all information and facts.
Why waste money on a college education when all I have to do is listen to talk radio and watch Fox?
A few years ago, while a student at Columbia University, I took a course called "Introduction to Clinical Research/Emergency Medicine". It featured a practical component wherein you assisted with research in emergency rooms. It also featured an academic portion that focused on how to properly formulate a study AND (with greater emphasis) how to identify when results are misread by the mainstream and misunderstood.
According to the studies we looked at, in comparison to the NY Times Science section (which is garbage for almost all of its science articles), annual mammorgram screenings did NOT reduce the risk of death in women in all populations studied. Notice the emphasis on "risk of death". These screenings DID find that women who got screened regularly WERE less likely to die of breast cancer. Yet they did not live any longer than those who were not screened regularly (among all populations). So, regular breast cancer screenings did NOT increase a women's life expectancy; they merely decreased the chance of them dying from this ONE specific cause. But they didn't live longer... they merely died of something ELSE within the same time frame of women who didn't get screened regularly, or at all.
Take that how you will. I bring it up more as a point about how the results of scientific studies are usually subtle, and thus sensationalized by the media to the point of misreporting.
It came down to a "take your pick" kind of thing: Get the screenings, and die of something other breast cancer, or don't get the screenings, and die of breast cancer or other things within the same time frame.
This was about four years ago. Just for discussion... please no flaming.
What defines "at risk". From my understanding is that if there is a history of cancer in your family, you are at risk... so given those parameters, I understand the recommendations.
It just makes me angry when I see Fox news try to turn this into something it's not to further their agena.