Maybe You Can Stop Having Your Breasts Squashed

It surely can't be good for them, dears.

American women have the highest incidence rates of breast cancer in the world.

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They say that the sisterhood is powerful, but in the case of breast cancer the sisterhood is caught between an industry that gets rich off of it and a political party that uses it as a punching bag.

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The Dear Friend & Conscience has been a health-care professional all her working life. She has toiled for many thousands of hours in intensive care units and is certified every which way. She regularly self examines her breasts but refuses to have mammograms because she has long believed their benefits to be wildly exaggerated. And the American Cancer Society, of all organizations, acknowledges that she is correct.

"We don’t want people to panic,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the cancer society. "But I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated."

The American Cancer Society bombshell came on the heels of another recent study that recommended most women should start regular screenings at age 50, not 40, women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms every two years, rather than every year, and self-breast examinations are not what they're cracked up to be.

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Left unsaid in Brawley's candid and perhaps even courageous comment is that breast-cancer screenings and the invasive radiation treatments, painful needle biopsies and surgeries that often result are a multi-billion dollar industry that gets filthy rich on overdiagnoses. Then there's this: Too many women who have been treated for breast cancer-related reasons cannot get health insurance or are dropped by their insurers.

  Kiko’s House

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway. And I'm sure if you should be so unfortunate as to contract breast cancer, your doctor is going to say that only if you'd been having regular mammograms....