Delaying Mammograms Until After 50?

The results of the study may be right, but the recommendations based on those results are unequivocally wrong.

Because my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 31, my first mammogram was strongly recommended and then done when I was 21. Since then I’ve had over a dozen mammograms and have religiously self-examined. I initially had mixed feelings about the recommendations because of two things. 1) Nothing has ever come of all these exams (knock on wood) and the mammograms and doctors’ exams were excruciatingly painful. I have another one in a few weeks and I know I will be in tears before I even park my car. 2) I have personally known many women who were saved by early detection and others who were in a great deal of pain for an extended period of time before they died because the cancer wasn’t caught in time, or at all.

The results appear to be the number of exams (self and doctor) held up against the number of women whose lives were saved. This is a problematic way of seeing things no matter what you’re talking about. A lot of people are suffering needlessly because of our societal ideal that death is the worst thing, and that what we do as living persons should be measured by how much success we’ve had at keeping them out of the clutches of death.

Robert Fulghum once said, “There are many ways to lose your life. Death is only one of them.” My mother’s battle with cancer was horrible. Her treatment would be unthinkable today, and her follow up care was nonexistent. The woman those doctors treated did live. My mother, however, did not come home from that hospital – ever. She was medically neglected, her family was never properly advised, she fell into and crawled out of depression, she developed lymphedema during her five year “death watch” (nothing says “survivor” like that catchy phrase) and she died of liver cancer. But hey, they “saved” her, right?

Do understand, however, that this study’s authors aren’t the only (or first) culprits in the long line of people who purport to help but instead actively discourage women from doing what is right. Holding up celebrities as models of breast cancer survivorship is just sick because the message they send is so not the truth: “Hey you there in the trailer park, here’s a list of women with money (read: decent physical and mental healthcare to include plastic surgery, dieticians, support systems, etc) who did what you can’t possibly hope to do. Good luck with your cancer and here’s some pink thing or other.”

The study authors’ recommendation that the average women just up and forfeit what little control she does have over her own health is not only ludicrous, it’s criminal. The conspiratorialist might even suggest this is but one of many ways to slice and dice at healthcare costs rather than treat women like people – many of whom are no longer of childbearing age and aren’t always thought to be among society’s major contributors anymore.

Statistics mean nothing to the individual, and they don’t define the actions that lead to discovery or death, which is to say that there have been many mammograms done on women who were, later, found to have had cancer all along. I was in the hospital this time last year with a woman who underwent a double mastectomy by a second doctor because the first doctor didn’t do the lumpectomies that would’ve halted the cancer.

The recommendations of this study sound eerily like that line from Poltergeist (“all are welcome, into the light”), echoing the archaic sentiment that doctors are gods and patients, women especially, should just leave well enough alone. Early detection (not to mention awareness and education) would’ve saved my mother’s life – not just her body.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task force can tell their story walkin’ all the way to my mother’s grave.

Sorry, that is Dr. Bevers, not Bievers.

People are now more aware of cervical cancer than breast cancer.