Breast cancer

I go on about the popular presentation of cancer and how it must look to most people. It is so mis-informative that it has turned most cancer awareness to nonsense. The chatter of the associated cancer charities wheeling out their legions of slebs yet again seem to tell women that breast cancer is the biggest health problem facing them. 

It is big, but not the biggest. Or the only one.

The New Year began with a BBC story about inequity in cancer research spend. Whilst reading it I chewed on my own sofa.

I’m training my beady eye on breast cancer charities, picking over their joint response to last week’s outcome of the breast screening review. A bit of context: I refused breast screening last year, based on the inadequate information on risks that was available to me. Now I am better informed via the Review I’ll probably continue unscreened as, for me, the benefit isn’t big enough to risk the risks.

The review on breast screening estimates that every year about 4,000 women are ‘overdiagnosed’ with breast cancer. ‘Overdiagnosed’ means that as a result of breast screening a cancer has been identified and treated, but in the absence of screening it would never have threatened life and would have remained undetected in a lifetime. Some of these overdiagnosed women - but neither we nor they know which they are - will be advocates for breast screening when that is both misinformed and misinforming.

I recently sent in my response to the consultation on informed choice, information and NHS cancer screening programmes. Here is the nubbins.

I’m pretty interested in screening in general and cancer screening in particular.

Benefit? Sounds more like a risk…..

In July 1985 a working group under Sir Patrick Forrest was invited by Ken Clarke (yes him, the same Ken Clarke as our current Ken Clarke) to look at the evidence on breast screening and decide what to do about it. It made its report - Breast Cancer Screening - in November 1986. The Government accepted it in full for implementation in early 1987.

Hence our current breast screening programme.

Here’s a brief thing. Brief? Ha! We’ll see. I’m back to thinking about the current Breast Screening Review. I wondered when it would be completed, so I went to the page about it on CR-UK’s website. It still said Spring/Summer 2012, as it always has. That’s fine. I sent them an email to ask if there was a more up-to-date estimate.

Then I noticed some info. has been updated. 

There was another publication on the unintended consequences of mammography last week, so off I went to look at it. Ha! Bless those Scandewegians. Who knew they’d  turn out to be so much trouble on breast screening? Norwegians this time. It’s been Danes. They host the Nordic Cochrane Group in Copenhagen who stirred things up in the past, questioning just what on earth breast screening is doing to women.…..

We? I mean women, mostly; and people who work in cancer charities. That, in a nutshell, is my response to Lea Pool’s documentary Pink Ribbons Inc. shown in London as part of the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival.