Did you know that our entire strategy against breast cancer is wrong and is not assisting us in any authentic way?

Did you know? (i am aware i'm treading on delicate ground here but that is the nature of this series and i just can't hold myself back when something is this clear and people we care about are dying too young) Did you know that our entire strategy against breast cancer is wrong and is not assisting us in any authentic way?
I caveat from the beginning to declare that if you are a women who suspects a lump in your breast absolutely go for a mammagram and get it checked out.

The national strategy of simply self-checking for breast cancer as the number one methodology in the fight to eradicate it while actively doing things that cause breast cancer...is not a scientifically valid one. This is especially true when nobody is clarifying the potential causes well enough. How can the best advice really be to just sit back and wait?

We need to be more aware that breast cancer often has roots in certain lifestyle things that can be easily taken into account... like NO MORE ANTIPERSPIRANT (contains the heavy metal called Aluminum and is applied in close proximity to the mammary glands) ... and less Alcohol which suppresses the immune system and less animals foods which stimulate tumor growths.

Our breast cancer awareness campaigns would be well served to focus huge resources on making sure the millions and millions of younger women are not doing practices that have a high probability of leading to undesirable outcomes.

There is a place for all tactics in something as important as the eradication of breast cancer... i am simply praying that all people involved in the campaign are clear that the goal is to eradicate breast cancer...and not to manage it.

Breast Cancer False Positives

One of the most interesting parts of this article from the NY Times yesterday is where it is admitted that they have a very hard time trying to figure out if a cluster of cells in malignant or benign. It is very interesting because it may be that at that point the cluster of cells has not decided. There are so many places along the way that Cancer cell formation can be mitigated and possibly reversed. Understanding what foods promote tumor growth and which foods reverse the trend is invaluable information. Cancer is not a big deal necessarily. It becomes a bigger deal because we continue to 'feed it'.

Nearly a year earlier, in 2007, a pathologist at a small hospital in Cheboygan, Mich., had found the earliest stage of breast cancer from a biopsy. Extensive surgery followed, leaving Ms. Long’s right breast missing a golf-ball-size chunk.

Now she was being told the pathologist had made a mistake. Her new doctor was certain she never had the disease, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. It had all been unnecessary — the surgery, the radiation, the drugs and, worst of all, the fear.

“Psychologically, it’s horrible,” Ms. Long said. “I never should have had to go through what I did.”

Like most women, Ms. Long had regarded the breast biopsy as the gold standard, an infallible way to identify cancer. “I thought it was pretty cut and dried,” said Ms. Long, who is a registered nurse.

As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.

Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”

There is an increasing recognition of the problems, and the federal government is now financing a nationwide study of variations in breast pathology, based on concerns that 17 percent of D.C.I.S. cases identified by a commonly used needle biopsy may be misdiagnosed. Despite this, there are no mandated diagnostic standards or requirements that pathologists performing the work have any specialized expertise, meaning that the chances of getting an accurate diagnosis vary from hospital to hospital.

Dr. Linh Vi, the pathologist at Cheboygan Memorial Hospital who diagnosed D.C.I.S. in Ms. Long, was not board certified and has said he reads about 50 breast biopsies a year, far short of the experience that leading pathologists say is needed in dealing with the nuances of difficult breast cancer cases. In responding to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Long, Dr. Vi maintains that she had cancer and that two board-certified pathologists at a neighboring hospital concurred with his diagnosis.

Yet several leading experts who reviewed Ms. Long’s case disagreed, with one saying flatly that her local pathologists “blew the diagnosis.”

The questions that often surround D.C.I.S. diagnoses take on added significance when combined with criticism that it is both overdiagnosed and overtreated in the United States — concerns that helped fuel the recent controversy over the routine use of mammograms for women in their 40s.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel that issues guidelines on cancer screening, found last November that the downside of routine annual mammograms for younger women might offset the benefits of early detection. The panel specifically referred to overdiagnosis of D.C.I.S., as well as benign but atypical breast lesions that left undetected would never cause problems.

D.C.I.S., which is also called Stage 0 or noninvasive cancer, was a rare diagnosis before mammograms began to be widely used in the 1980s. Until then, breast pathology typically involved reading tissue from palpable lumps. The diagnoses — usually invasive cancer, a benign fibroid tumor or a cyst — were often obvious.