Women's health

Masses! Absolutely masses. Health awareness and charities….. Tch. It’s all gone to nonsense, hasn’t it? There are so many Days/Weeks/Months the concept is just silly, offering little of actual use to the audience. Many are only done because it’s ‘what you do’ in broad-brush healthee charidee way.

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.

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.

The Review is out. I've just scan read the summary, from The Lancet online and comment in various places.

I was a breast screening refusenik already. Now I will continue to be a breast screening refusenik. But a more confident one....

I am not immune to breast cancer. I know that. Neither am I reckless with my health. I am cross however, that overdiagnosis by breast screening has been warned about since at least 1988, and no one has ever bothered women and their pretty little heads with this.

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.

Today’s the day I rush up to Barclays and jab my mighty right forefinger in their corporate rib cage and bellow “Oi! Barclays! No! What are you thinking?”

Apart from ‘ooo….. money’ and ‘cooo….. profit’ that is?

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.