Many women are enduring 'breast cancer' treatments unnecessarily. - Healthy Life Essex

For a long time, Healthy Life has been concerned about some aspects of mammography. Research shows that the breast screening programme for ‘healthy’ women is not terribly accurate and can, in some cases, actually cause harm to women.

While mammography certainly has an important role to play, we believe  options such as thermography should be offered to women as a safer alternative. Women, and men, are not given enough information to enable them to make educated choices about an aspect of their health that could have a huge impact on their lives. Please read our article on Thermography for Early Breast Disease Diagnosis.

Increasingly, research also shows there is a high rate of ‘false positive’ results leading to women undergoing painful treatment such as surgery including mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. The mammography equipment is enable to detect if a cancerous tumour is slow-growing so that a atient would probably die of other causes before the cancer became a problem, or if it would remain dormant or even regress. (Thermography is able to detect these changes.)

The latest research carried by scientists at the Nordic Cochrane Centre, analysed breast cancer trends seven years before and seven years after the introduction of screening programmes in five countries – the UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden and Norway.  The scientists estimate the level of over overdiagnosis to be about 35%. This means a third of women having painful and unpleasant treatments for breast cancer may have done so unnecessarily.

While the current screening programme does undoubtedly save lives, research continues to question the overall benefits.  Mammography screening should be a matter of informed choice. The NHS and other breast cancer organisations have a duty to make all the facts clear. Their current literature including numerous promotional campaigns to increase the rates of breast screening quite clearly fails to do so.