Stacy Malkan
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 The Breast Cancer Fund, along with several other groups in the Alliance — Friends of the Earth, the National Black Environmental Justice Coalition, National Environmental Trust and Alliance for Healthy research into less-toxic treatments, alternatives to mammography and prevention of the disease. After almost ten years at the helm of the Breast Cancer Fund, Andrea had another fateful trip to the doctor's office and another horrible diagnosis. She learned she had a malignant brain tumor, which the doctors suspected was caused by radiation treatments for the breast cancer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Then exposing your breast tissue to mammogram radiation while calling it "prevention" makes about as much sense as smoking cigarettes to prevent Tuberculosis because the toxic cigarette smoke kills viruses. mammography actually causes breast cancer, and as previous research has shown, ten women are ultimately harmed by breast cancer screening programs for every one woman who is helped or saved by it. (Click here to read the full story on that.)
I'm nearly convinced that U.S. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The ACS is the wealthiest non-profit in America and has very close ties to pharmaceutical companies, mammography equipment companies and other corporations that profit from cancer. Notice the name, too: It isn't the American Anti-Cancer Society, it's the American Cancer Society! What they really stand for is right in the name!
Click here to read more about the ACS and its financial ties to chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies and radiology equipment manufacturers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 As I've stated in previous articles here on NewsTarget, mammography harms 10 women for every 1 that it helps. Conventional breast cancer treatment is largely a medical hoax where men use fear to control women by corralling them into treatments where they can poison them with chemotherapy or slice off their breasts. (Sound insane? It is.)
My advice to women is to learn from your painful periods rather than trying to dissociate yourself from them. A painful period is a messenger that's trying to tell you something. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The rate of false positives is shockingly high, and mammography has been scientifically proven to harm 10 women for every one woman that it helps.)
If you undergo such barbaric procedures, note that using aloe vera (both internally and externally) can greatly improve your results by protecting you from the treatment itself. Of course, modern oncologists are simultaneously so arrogant and ignorant that they will insist you take nothing that might "interfere" with their poisons, which is why people who foolishly believe in modern oncology are rapidly removing themselves from the human gene pool. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Besides, mammography is wildly profitable, and the makers of mammography equipment give huge donations to non-profit cancer institutions, where they exert tremendous influence. And they, of course, don't want to see any new technology come along that makes their existing equipment less valuable. That is, unless they invent the new technology themselves.
For doctors, there's tremendous resistance to the idea of being able to detect disease by sniffing a patient. This idea just seems too non-technical to be believed. |
Bill Sardi
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 I also read that mammography brings in the big $$$ for the cancer society so they continue to encourage its use, despite being aware of its dangers and ineffectiveness. I also read a report from the professor emeritus of molecular and cellular biology at UC Berkeley concerning all the destruction caused by radiation.
I am very upset that they have now turned my mother into one of their "manageable patients" and are possibly exploiting her and deceiving her. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The ultra-wealthy ACS non-profit, with all its ties to pharmaceutical companies and mammography machine manufacturers, still refuses to openly urge women to prevent breast cancer by getting more vitamin D through nutritional supplements or sensible sunlight exposure. In fact, the organization continues to warn people away from sunlight, actually contributing to the mass vitamin D deficiency that's now rampant in western nations (including the U.S., Canada and the U.K.).
Vitamin D deficiency greatly reduces the body's ability to halt the growth of cancer tumors. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 For instance, it may never be possible to conduct a clinical trial to test whether mammography really brings down death rates because too many women and their doctors are already convinced of its merits and will never be willing to enter a trial that might randomly assign them not to be screened for breast cancer. In cases where the benefits of a procedure, drug, or test are uncertain, patients need to be given clear, unbiased information about what's at stake. |
Walter Last
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 The mammogram group had many more lumpectomies and surgeries, and the death rate was 107 deaths in the mammography group and 105 in the physical examination group.51 Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a common noninvasive form of breast cancer. Most cases of DCIS are detected through the use of mammography; in younger women, 92 percent of all cancers detected by mammography are of this type. Nevertheless, on average, 44 percent, and in some states 60 percent, of these are treated by mastectomy. As most of these tumors are harmless, this greatly improves the survival statistics. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Very clear and specific standards and targets need to be set for interpretation of mammography," said the study's lead author. "Radiologists who perform outside acceptable ranges need to be told: 'that's not acceptable.'"37
We are not saying that a substantial proportion of physicians are incompetent. What we are saying is that the competence of physicians, even specialists, cannot be assumed as a given.
2. Does Screening Improve Prognosis?
The question is fundamental. Diagnosis has value, but not in and of itself. |
Devra Davis
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 The impact of showing that mammography actually worked on older women was breathtaking. The long drought of failed promises was over. Finally, after years of promises, a life-sparing technology was at hand.
Convinced that all women would benefit from regular mammograms and caught up in the political and economic enthusiasm of combating cancer, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) launched a massive demonstration project on breast cancer detection in 1972 that covered women of all ages. |
| We talked about creating master mammography readers who would provide standardized second opinions on all films, which has long been done in Scandinavia. Blumenthal came up with an innovative scheme to use technologies of the space and intelligence agencies that can read a license plate from outer space to enhance the ability to find early signs of cancer within the breast. Despite these efforts and major technical progress on several fronts, no major change in how mammograms should be read and reviewed ever happened. |
| To understand why, you need to know that mammography is one of the most oversold and understudied technologies in medical history. X-rays of the breast can find small white tracks of calcium that signal cancer years before it can be felt or seen. Like many stories in medicine, it all started with a terrible loss.
Distinguished radiologist Phillip Strax had been powerless to prevent his young wife from dying of breast cancer. If only he had been able to find her cancer earlier, he lamented, she might have survived. |
| The fleeting discomfort of mammography is one of those things women don't usually talk about. Nobody wants to be a candy ass about going through something that yields life-saving information.
Cancer specialists had long appreciated that breast cancer, like most adult forms of the illness, appears only after years of growth. Before it can be seen on x-ray, what starts out as an invisibly damaged solitary cell of the damaged breast has to elude millions of efforts to kill or fix it. Cancer cells feed on and spew out sugar, one of the fastest fuels it can consume. |
| The campaign for mammography became wrapped in military metaphors that resonated with a public already wearied of the failed conflict in Southeast Asia.
Holleb urged putting this life-saving technology into broad operation as soon as possible.
"No longer can we ask the people of this country to tolerate a loss of life from breast cancer each year equal to the loss of life in the past ten years in Viet Nam. The time has come for greater national effort. I firmly believe that time is now. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| In a brilliant essay on mammography and the limits of seeing, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell tells a story that illustrates how high-tech images can be deceiving. When the first Gulf War began, the U.S. Air Force employed two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets to find and destroy Scud missile launch sites in the Iraqi desert. After a Scud was airborne, it would leave a light trail in the night sky, allowing the fighter pilots to narrow down the site of the launch to a few square miles. |
Bottom Line Health
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| THE STUDY
When researchers reviewed mammography use in 797 women older than age 55 who had been treated for breast cancer, they found that in the first year after treatment, 80% of the women had gotten a mammogram. But only 63% of the women had gotten a mammogram in the fifth year after treatment began. Over the five-year study period, only one in three—33%—had gotten a mammogram every year, as recommended.
Overall, healthy women are not as faithful to mammograms as health-care professionals would like. |
Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman
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 If a malignancy is present in a woman over 50, mammography has a 90 percent chance of finding it.
• Women who undergo regular mammography are more likely to be diagnosed early, when the chances of being cured are higher and less radical treatment options are available.
In a study of over 1,000 women with operable breast cancer, those whose cancers were diagnosed by mammography had tumors that were significantly smaller and more often lymph node-negative (both a result of early diagnosis), compared to women whose malignances were not detected by mammography. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Age-adjusted incidence of breast cancer in industrialized countries has increased 1 to 2 percent per year for several decades, both before and after the introduction of mammography.
?Prostate cancer is up nearly 290 percent in the last fifty years.
?Thyroid cancer is up 258 percent.
Cases of skin melanomas are up almost 700 percent in the last fifty years.
?Lung cancer is currently the most common cause of cancer death in women, with the death rate more than two times what it was twenty-five years ago. |
Bottom Line Health
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| We hear it a lot about mammography in general," she says, referring to women's tendency to not get regular mammograms.
Perkins speculates that "the longer you are cancer-free, the more 'normal' you feel, and then [you] begin to behave more like the general population."
Perkins believes that the fear of a recurrence keeps breast cancer survivors from getting mammograms. But she would tell them, "The earlier you detect anything that might recur, the better your chances to have a successful treatment the next time around. |
Devra Davis
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| The push for mammography cannot be separated from the rise of feminism at about the same time. Women's body parts and lives were named and bandied about at the time in ways that were nothing short of revolutionary. In some circles, women met in groups, equipped with mirror, flashlight and speculum, to learn how to gaze at their hidden cervix. Breast cancer also came out of the closet and bedroom. Diagrams showed women how to feel their own breasts and encouraged them to do so regularly to try to find early tumors. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| And yet, many of the screening tests we imagine will protect us— mammography, colonoscopy, and more recently, CT scans to screen for lung cancer—suffer from many of the same drawbacks as the PSA test. The only cancer screening test that has been shown unequivocally to decrease mortality is the venerable Pap smear for cervical cancer. Yet even that is not a fail-safe talisman for warding off premature death. |
Mike Adams
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 Many of the breast-cancer-detection machines or mammography machines are not even calibrated correctly. mammography itself is a procedure that actually causes breast cancer, because the machines emit radiation that promotes DNA damage in the breast tissue. We have a situation here where the very machines that conventional medicine uses to detect breast cancer also give patients breast cancer. |
T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. and Thomas M. Campbell II
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 Some studies34-36 have found that groups of women who undergo frequent mammography have slightly lower mortality rates than groups of women who do not undergo frequent mammography. This implies that our cancer treatments are more likely to be successful if the cancer is found at an earlier stage. This is likely to be true, but there is some concern over the way statistics are used in this debate. |
Mike Adams
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| Many of the breast-cancer-detection machines or mammography machines are not even calibrated correctly. mammography itself is a procedure that actually causes breast cancer, because the machines emit radiation that promotes DNA damage in the breast tissue. We have a situation here where the very machines that conventional medicine uses to detect breast cancer also give patients breast cancer. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Women ages fifty to fifty-nine are encouraged to have an annual breast exam and mammography.
Second, doctors themselves acknowledge that they often treat a disease with a medication even if they know it won't help because they would rather do something than just stand by. Or they may take the position that the medicine "might help, and couldn't hurt." Unfortunately, many times a drug that won't help you may indeed hurt you. In the past twenty years the length of time it takes to review a medication for approval has gone from a few years to six months. |
Ray D. Strand
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 We have achieved some improvements, but those lie largely in the realm of being able to detect some cancers sooner through advances such as mammography for the detection of breast cancer and PSA tests for prostate cancer.
Is earlier detection all we can hope for? No. In this chapter we will discuss some of the most recent advances in cancer research and how you may be able to lower your risk of developing cancer.
Cancer and Its Causes
Doesn't it seem that just about anything we do or eat these days allegedly causes cancer? Excessive exposure to sunlight increases the risk of skin cancer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Did you know that mammograms give you cancer? The mammography equipment actually radiates your breast. Computed Tomography scans give you more radiation than hundreds of chest x-rays. A number of doctors were asked this question about CT scans, and only 20 percent knew how much radiation the scans would produce. Sure, it's $1,000 for the test, and you get mega amounts of radiation. Along with this radiation, why don't you take some prescription drugs, which also impair immune system function and cause nutritional deficiency, promoting chronic diseases? |
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