A meta-analysis published on the eve of Breast Cancer Awareness Month declares overdiagnosis “less than 5%.” Its benchmark is its lead author’s own 2013 study, drawn from a dataset the same researchers showed in 2018 can yield anywhere from 1% to 55%.
Imagine if there were a "Breast Cancer Cured awareness month." But no. Cured is not medically defined for breast cancer. But wait, there's more. Cured is not medically defined for the common cold, influenza, measles, nor COVID. No doctor documents cured cases. No clinic or hospital system collects data on cured cases of any disease. Cureds are common place, but the word cureds, to refer to cured cases of disease does not exist in modern medicine. A focus on disease generates business. Prevention is financially beneficial. Cured? No medical or insurance system distinguishes between cured and cure failures. Treatments are billed. Cureds? Not.
I am so thankful, in some ways, for the WWW giving us access to folks like yourself with ability to look critically and intemperate the "science" (and those who claim they are science 😝)
Thank you, Sayer, for scientifically and eloquently (as always) critiquing yet another industrial/medical promotion. After some basic research years ago, mammograms never made sense to me and I finally swore them off a couple of decades ago. I've done my part, also, to warn friends who delighted in going on pink walks and giving money to "the cause" about what they were actually supporting. Makes me feel like a party pooper, but it's important for people to fully inform themselves before following any hyped-up medical bandwagon.....
The false positives in mammograms is much higher than 5%. I personally know 3 women in the past 2 years who were told they were at at risk of having cancer from something looking suspicious in their breasts (from a mammogram) and had very invasive and painful biopsies (which of course could spread the cancer if it truly was cancer). All 3 came back as negative after a truly terrifying and painful experience. I believe the entire diagnosis process with mammograms causes more harm than benefit. I do not know of any women who actually had breast cancer accurately diagnosed from this process. I for one have stopped doing brutal mammograms at least 10 years ago.
I had my first mammogram in 2012 at age 40. I received a breast cancer diagnosis. After my lumpectomy I was told: clear margins, lymph nodes clear, it hadn’t gone anywhere.
Next thing I knew I was being scheduled for a round of chemotherapy. They said it was HER2 positive. I started researching. Dennis Slamon developed Herceptin to treat HER2 positive cancer. I watched the documentary. They were going to give me 16 weeks of treatment along with two chemo drugs. I said, “Are there other treatment options I should be aware of?” My doctor said he’d ask at their next board meeting and get back to me. My treatment was postponed. He came back telling me an institute in Boston was doing 12 weeks, using only one chemo drug (Taxol) the least toxic of the two, with the Herceptin.
I researched taxol. Originally the cytotoxic agent was thought to be the bark of a yew tree, but turned out to be a fungus growing on the bark that was killing cancer cells. I was already taking Turkeytail mushroom extract based on a presentation I attended by Paul Staments at a permaculture conference. I trust the fungi. I went forward with treatment and breezed through it with a positive attitude.
Then came the radiation. When I started treatment they disclosed that radiation causes cancer, which I was aware of so the treatment didn’t make logical sense. Clear margins. It didn’t go anywhere. What are they targeting, healthy cells?
Each night I was reading scientific journal articles. Secondary cancer, a risk from the treatment of the first. A day or two later I was at an art cooperative where I volunteered a few hours a week. A woman walked in, also bald but wearing a cute winter hat, just like me. She said, can I ask a personal question? Sure. What kind of cancer are you being treated for? I said breast cancer. She told me she had been treated four years earlier for breast cancer, now she was being treated for leukemia, a blood cancer.
At my radiation appointment a woman who seemed a bit horrified invited me to take a look at her mother, who was further into her treatment. I peeked behind the curtain, intense burns and it looked incredibly painful. I empathize with what they must be going through.
I had coffee with a few friends and told them I was not comfortable with the treatment, especially due to the articles I had been reading. My friend asked if I’d done any prayer. Interesting. I’m not religious but I have a powerful breathing and meditation practice that I do from time to time. The next morning I did the practice. My hands filled with energy then spontaneously moved near my left breast. I then felt what I can only describe as thousands of souls crying out to me, the sadness I felt was overwhelming and tears flowed down my cheeks, down my neck, and continued down my chest. I heard the words, “Stop. Stop the attack.”
I reached out to my intuitive medical friend for support. Telling the establishment that I was refusing treatment was not easy. After the call I confidently called the receptionist and cancelled all future radiation treatments.
They put me on tamoxifen. I believe I was on it for a month or so, they had told me I’d be on it for 10 years. I refused it because I don’t inherently trust pharmaceutical companies, and changing treatment recommendations from 5 to 10 years seemed arbitrary. Your article only confirms that my intuitive response was correct.
My gynecologist suggested I do the genetic testing, saying if a had some genetic marker I might want to get a double mastectomy just to be safe. I said no, and have never returned to the clinic.
They told me I had stage 1 breast cancer, it was ductal carcinoma in situ. I have always wondered if I would have been fine without treatment. I guess I’ll never know.
I have never identified myself as a survivor and I have a serious problem with the pink ribbon campaign. I have always thought the focus should be on removing carcinogens from our environment.
I stopped mammograms in about 2010 after reading Dr. Mercola's article on its dangers. I have had a couple of thermography scans since then and recently a full body MRI. A mammogram did find a cancerous breast tumour on a 58 year old friend of mine; the tumour was biopsied to make sure it was cancerous and she went through the usual cancer treatments. This was 4 years ago and so far she is doing well. Needless to say, she and her sister (who avoid vaccines and try alternative health routes) feel the benefits outweigh the risks. At least her choice was an informed one. Thank you for this article.
Tumors are created by excess protein, excess fat and excess carbs...eat right and eliminate tumors. Medical doctors don't study nutrition...and the wrong nutrition is the cause of most problems in the human body. I got into the study of nutrition in 1961, because a pediatrician's erroneous information and treatments nearly killed my first child...I got rid of tumors twice by eliminating the foods, which caused them..
I eliminated whole categories...NO PROCESSED, except some coconut milk in my beverages, .NO Dairy, nuts and seeds, salad oils, Grains, meat. fish. chicken...cruciferous and nightshade vegetables...I eat a lot of specific fruit and specific veggies, and organic eggs from our organically fed chickens. I am doing great and have lots of energy. and no physical problems. Protein is for growth and repair...and Americans with their fixation on protein...have done a lot of growth. I noted that Americans did not have a weight problem in the 40s and 50s, before they started eating a lot of proteIN, plus Processed food. I was one of them in the 1960s.
Thank you, Barbara. I do believe the first thing folks should do is ‘subtraction’ (sugar, grains, processed junk, restaurant food, seed oils, soy, low quality meats). And then eat only whole/real food with no ingredient lists. Bone broth from cows properly raised is something I like. And, yes, people have gotten huge! So, eating smaller quantities can be important, too. The world has become awfully ‘food-centric’.
"Food centric" is right. People are so afraid of not having enough food, when the foods that they are eating are killing them. They stockpile foods, which have years of shelf life and will provide no live nutrients or life for their bodies. i was a child born in 1934, who survived the Great Depression .and we had no food for years. I believe i was nursed or i never would have made it. I don't remember sitting down at a table and eating , until after I was 7 or 8., when i was invited to have a meal with relatives. I didn't know how to use utensils. Americans had no weight problems, before the 1960s...and more money was in the picture.
I still trust the Cochrane findings over whatever an organization recommends that exists solely to scare women and profit off them. The American Cancer Society is the same as American Heart Association and similar organizations in not truly supporting anything that prevents what they purport to care about.
Even Cochrane is now compromised, accepting Gates funding and whatnot. Gøtzsche's book "Mammography Screening: Truth, Lies and Controversy" gets into the political and personal fallout associated with the Cochrane findings. TBH, I'm surprised the Cochrane findings are still online; I PDF'd them when I discovered them years ago, expecting them to disappear.
Sayer, the strongest part of this piece is the part where you let the authors indict themselves. The 2018 'As you like it' admission — that the same Funen data can produce anything from 1% to 55% depending on the study design — does more damage to the '<5%' headline than any conflict-of-interest chart. If the answer is design-dependent, then a new design matched against a benchmark selected by the same researchers cannot be a resolution. It is, as you put it, one side publishing its position.
Where I would push back gently is the tamoxifen thread. As a pharmacist, I live with that drug's ledger daily: its IARC Group 1 classification rests on endometrial cancer — a real but small absolute risk — while its benefit in ER-positive disease is among the best-quantified survival gains in oncology. The scandal framing risks blurring a genuine risk-benefit calculus that high-risk women do navigate with their clinicians.
My question: doesn't the COMET/LORD evidence point to the actual escape hatch? If low-risk DCIS can be watched rather than excised, the overdiagnosis percentage matters less — because the harm was never the diagnosis itself, but the automaticity of treatment.
Great comments. I'll have to put some more thought to what you are are bringing up. The Tamoxifen research I have indexed is rather damning. Although I appreciate your willingness to push back and dialogue. Have you seen this previously on GMI? https://greenmedinfo.com/problem-substance/tamoxifen-1
I’ve always thought Breast Cancer Awareness Month was a scam. How can pink crap (mostly plastic, made in China) reduce breast cancer? What a joke. This marketing scam has grown to a ludicrous level. Pink shoes worn by NFL players, on and on. My small Midwestern city has pink plastic ribbons all over downtown. To what end? Fill the landfills and oceans with more plastic?
My stepdaughter had two breast X-rays showing nodules? I gave her fenbendazole; she took 200 mg twice a day for a few months. In her third X-ray, they were all gone. Doc said, "I don't know what you did, but they are all gone"! (I don't know or want to know is the new doctor's oath!
Imagine if there were a "Breast Cancer Cured awareness month." But no. Cured is not medically defined for breast cancer. But wait, there's more. Cured is not medically defined for the common cold, influenza, measles, nor COVID. No doctor documents cured cases. No clinic or hospital system collects data on cured cases of any disease. Cureds are common place, but the word cureds, to refer to cured cases of disease does not exist in modern medicine. A focus on disease generates business. Prevention is financially beneficial. Cured? No medical or insurance system distinguishes between cured and cure failures. Treatments are billed. Cureds? Not.
Yes, health management is very profitable for these black magicians in white coats. True healing does exist through Nature.
I am so thankful, in some ways, for the WWW giving us access to folks like yourself with ability to look critically and intemperate the "science" (and those who claim they are science 😝)
Thank you, Sayer, for scientifically and eloquently (as always) critiquing yet another industrial/medical promotion. After some basic research years ago, mammograms never made sense to me and I finally swore them off a couple of decades ago. I've done my part, also, to warn friends who delighted in going on pink walks and giving money to "the cause" about what they were actually supporting. Makes me feel like a party pooper, but it's important for people to fully inform themselves before following any hyped-up medical bandwagon.....
The false positives in mammograms is much higher than 5%. I personally know 3 women in the past 2 years who were told they were at at risk of having cancer from something looking suspicious in their breasts (from a mammogram) and had very invasive and painful biopsies (which of course could spread the cancer if it truly was cancer). All 3 came back as negative after a truly terrifying and painful experience. I believe the entire diagnosis process with mammograms causes more harm than benefit. I do not know of any women who actually had breast cancer accurately diagnosed from this process. I for one have stopped doing brutal mammograms at least 10 years ago.
I had my first mammogram in 2012 at age 40. I received a breast cancer diagnosis. After my lumpectomy I was told: clear margins, lymph nodes clear, it hadn’t gone anywhere.
Next thing I knew I was being scheduled for a round of chemotherapy. They said it was HER2 positive. I started researching. Dennis Slamon developed Herceptin to treat HER2 positive cancer. I watched the documentary. They were going to give me 16 weeks of treatment along with two chemo drugs. I said, “Are there other treatment options I should be aware of?” My doctor said he’d ask at their next board meeting and get back to me. My treatment was postponed. He came back telling me an institute in Boston was doing 12 weeks, using only one chemo drug (Taxol) the least toxic of the two, with the Herceptin.
I researched taxol. Originally the cytotoxic agent was thought to be the bark of a yew tree, but turned out to be a fungus growing on the bark that was killing cancer cells. I was already taking Turkeytail mushroom extract based on a presentation I attended by Paul Staments at a permaculture conference. I trust the fungi. I went forward with treatment and breezed through it with a positive attitude.
Then came the radiation. When I started treatment they disclosed that radiation causes cancer, which I was aware of so the treatment didn’t make logical sense. Clear margins. It didn’t go anywhere. What are they targeting, healthy cells?
Each night I was reading scientific journal articles. Secondary cancer, a risk from the treatment of the first. A day or two later I was at an art cooperative where I volunteered a few hours a week. A woman walked in, also bald but wearing a cute winter hat, just like me. She said, can I ask a personal question? Sure. What kind of cancer are you being treated for? I said breast cancer. She told me she had been treated four years earlier for breast cancer, now she was being treated for leukemia, a blood cancer.
At my radiation appointment a woman who seemed a bit horrified invited me to take a look at her mother, who was further into her treatment. I peeked behind the curtain, intense burns and it looked incredibly painful. I empathize with what they must be going through.
I had coffee with a few friends and told them I was not comfortable with the treatment, especially due to the articles I had been reading. My friend asked if I’d done any prayer. Interesting. I’m not religious but I have a powerful breathing and meditation practice that I do from time to time. The next morning I did the practice. My hands filled with energy then spontaneously moved near my left breast. I then felt what I can only describe as thousands of souls crying out to me, the sadness I felt was overwhelming and tears flowed down my cheeks, down my neck, and continued down my chest. I heard the words, “Stop. Stop the attack.”
I reached out to my intuitive medical friend for support. Telling the establishment that I was refusing treatment was not easy. After the call I confidently called the receptionist and cancelled all future radiation treatments.
They put me on tamoxifen. I believe I was on it for a month or so, they had told me I’d be on it for 10 years. I refused it because I don’t inherently trust pharmaceutical companies, and changing treatment recommendations from 5 to 10 years seemed arbitrary. Your article only confirms that my intuitive response was correct.
My gynecologist suggested I do the genetic testing, saying if a had some genetic marker I might want to get a double mastectomy just to be safe. I said no, and have never returned to the clinic.
They told me I had stage 1 breast cancer, it was ductal carcinoma in situ. I have always wondered if I would have been fine without treatment. I guess I’ll never know.
I have never identified myself as a survivor and I have a serious problem with the pink ribbon campaign. I have always thought the focus should be on removing carcinogens from our environment.
I stopped mammograms in about 2010 after reading Dr. Mercola's article on its dangers. I have had a couple of thermography scans since then and recently a full body MRI. A mammogram did find a cancerous breast tumour on a 58 year old friend of mine; the tumour was biopsied to make sure it was cancerous and she went through the usual cancer treatments. This was 4 years ago and so far she is doing well. Needless to say, she and her sister (who avoid vaccines and try alternative health routes) feel the benefits outweigh the risks. At least her choice was an informed one. Thank you for this article.
Tumors are created by excess protein, excess fat and excess carbs...eat right and eliminate tumors. Medical doctors don't study nutrition...and the wrong nutrition is the cause of most problems in the human body. I got into the study of nutrition in 1961, because a pediatrician's erroneous information and treatments nearly killed my first child...I got rid of tumors twice by eliminating the foods, which caused them..
What foods did you eliminate?
I eliminated whole categories...NO PROCESSED, except some coconut milk in my beverages, .NO Dairy, nuts and seeds, salad oils, Grains, meat. fish. chicken...cruciferous and nightshade vegetables...I eat a lot of specific fruit and specific veggies, and organic eggs from our organically fed chickens. I am doing great and have lots of energy. and no physical problems. Protein is for growth and repair...and Americans with their fixation on protein...have done a lot of growth. I noted that Americans did not have a weight problem in the 40s and 50s, before they started eating a lot of proteIN, plus Processed food. I was one of them in the 1960s.
Thank you, Barbara. I do believe the first thing folks should do is ‘subtraction’ (sugar, grains, processed junk, restaurant food, seed oils, soy, low quality meats). And then eat only whole/real food with no ingredient lists. Bone broth from cows properly raised is something I like. And, yes, people have gotten huge! So, eating smaller quantities can be important, too. The world has become awfully ‘food-centric’.
"Food centric" is right. People are so afraid of not having enough food, when the foods that they are eating are killing them. They stockpile foods, which have years of shelf life and will provide no live nutrients or life for their bodies. i was a child born in 1934, who survived the Great Depression .and we had no food for years. I believe i was nursed or i never would have made it. I don't remember sitting down at a table and eating , until after I was 7 or 8., when i was invited to have a meal with relatives. I didn't know how to use utensils. Americans had no weight problems, before the 1960s...and more money was in the picture.
I still trust the Cochrane findings over whatever an organization recommends that exists solely to scare women and profit off them. The American Cancer Society is the same as American Heart Association and similar organizations in not truly supporting anything that prevents what they purport to care about.
Even Cochrane is now compromised, accepting Gates funding and whatnot. Gøtzsche's book "Mammography Screening: Truth, Lies and Controversy" gets into the political and personal fallout associated with the Cochrane findings. TBH, I'm surprised the Cochrane findings are still online; I PDF'd them when I discovered them years ago, expecting them to disappear.
Sayer, the strongest part of this piece is the part where you let the authors indict themselves. The 2018 'As you like it' admission — that the same Funen data can produce anything from 1% to 55% depending on the study design — does more damage to the '<5%' headline than any conflict-of-interest chart. If the answer is design-dependent, then a new design matched against a benchmark selected by the same researchers cannot be a resolution. It is, as you put it, one side publishing its position.
Where I would push back gently is the tamoxifen thread. As a pharmacist, I live with that drug's ledger daily: its IARC Group 1 classification rests on endometrial cancer — a real but small absolute risk — while its benefit in ER-positive disease is among the best-quantified survival gains in oncology. The scandal framing risks blurring a genuine risk-benefit calculus that high-risk women do navigate with their clinicians.
My question: doesn't the COMET/LORD evidence point to the actual escape hatch? If low-risk DCIS can be watched rather than excised, the overdiagnosis percentage matters less — because the harm was never the diagnosis itself, but the automaticity of treatment.
Great comments. I'll have to put some more thought to what you are are bringing up. The Tamoxifen research I have indexed is rather damning. Although I appreciate your willingness to push back and dialogue. Have you seen this previously on GMI? https://greenmedinfo.com/problem-substance/tamoxifen-1
I’ve always thought Breast Cancer Awareness Month was a scam. How can pink crap (mostly plastic, made in China) reduce breast cancer? What a joke. This marketing scam has grown to a ludicrous level. Pink shoes worn by NFL players, on and on. My small Midwestern city has pink plastic ribbons all over downtown. To what end? Fill the landfills and oceans with more plastic?
My stepdaughter had two breast X-rays showing nodules? I gave her fenbendazole; she took 200 mg twice a day for a few months. In her third X-ray, they were all gone. Doc said, "I don't know what you did, but they are all gone"! (I don't know or want to know is the new doctor's oath!
I recommend watching the documentary: Boobs - The War on Women's Breasts.
Thank you