The other day I read an article on mammography, it is quite interesting not because of the related-to-breast part but the article actually highlight the other side or the harmful side about mammography.
According to the article, the major harm of mammography is over-diagnosed and over-treatment of a healthy patient. In simple words, mammography has caused more surgery to happen.
The likelihood of being over-diagnosed is 10 times larger than the likelihood of avoiding death from breast cancer. So, it makes sense to me not to go for a mammography.
According to the EVIDENCE based leaflets, if 2000 women are screened regularly (total of 10 years) for breast cancer, 1 would benefit from it; 10 healthy women would have undergo unnecessary surgery to remove whole/part of their breast; 200 women would receive a false alarm.
After looking at the statistics, I was thinking to myself that if that is the case, why should someone actually go for a mammography?
Perhaps the cost of the machine is huge and therefore doctors encourage more people to undergo the screening just to get back the money they invested in it (doctors definitely not social workers or doing free treatment for charity all the time) and somehow all the leaflets/information/flyers mislead the public by telling only one side of the story that is the benefits of a mammography – reassurance that you are healthy and breast cancer could be cured at early stage at the cost of little pain during mammography.
Of course I am not trying to be a doctor and there are a lot of details that I didn’t include here but I still believe that over-diagnosed happened pretty often regardless of mammography or any other illness. When doctors are presented with something they are not familiar with, they will still have to refer to medical books, consults other doctors or use the trial-and-error approach.
Those stuff I wrote about should be available here. There a lot articles about mommography there too.
I do find the usage of a photo of a woman undergoing mammography side by side with the article a little disturbing though.
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