Mammography Screening and Breast Cancer Rates: Breast Cancer Prevention Tips - E-book - ePub

Diagnosed with Breast Cancer. The phrase strikes fear in the hearts of patients and the ones who care about them. It is an underlying fear of anyone who presents to the doctor with strange symptoms, unexplained weight loss or masses. Being diagnosed with breast cancer also a universal fear of women undergoing mammography, healthy or not. Cancer is a very real thing to be scared of. But it's also NOT a time to give into fear and emotion in lieu of well-thought out decisions based on the best evidence that medicine knows of.
This eBook is likely going to cover things that will go against what society believes and promotes and this article may even go so far as to offend you or decisions that you have made in the past. Regardless of how this article makes you feel, just make sure that you give yourself the time to read it through. Before we get into the "meat" of the article, I do need to point out some very scary research.
Not so that I can start the article with a strong enough sense of dread so that you read it with the focus of my pit bull staring at a guinea pig, but so that you can understand that our entire focus on breast cancer is broken. From prevention to diagnosis to treatment. Broken. While medicine continues to argue about whether to perform mammography on women between 40-50 years old, the rates of being diagnosed with breast cancer that is more advanced is skyrocketing in women under 40.
Looking at the rates of being diagnosed with breast cancer in women under 40 from 1976 until 2009, there were some eye-opening findings:1. Stage IV breast cancer rates are going up in women under 40 (2.07% annually, with the exception of 2000-2009, when rates went up 3.6% annually).2. Stage IV breast cancer is much more difficult to treat.3. There is no screening recommended for women under 40.4. In this age group, breast cancer is not being found at earlier stages (regional, localized, or in situ categories).
In summary, things are getting worse. While medicine fights over who should get screened and when, more dangerous cancers in younger women are on the increase. We need to get our collective heads out of our asses and start to educate women of all ages on how to prevent breast cancer. Anything less will be a disaster.