Drive-through scammograms go west! False positives = true negatives A couple of recent items in the news have given me an opportunity to revisit a core issue of mine: The needlessness, hazardousness, and inherent unreliability of mammograms. Now, what you're about to read may come as a shock to you - it's certainly not breaking news to me: There are negative effects to the all-too-common occurrence of false-positive mammograms. According to a recent Associated Press story, women who are falsely informed that their mammograms reveal the likelihood of cancer often suffer serious anxiety - even long after they are made aware of the false alarm… No, really? You don't say. At first, I semi-entertained the notion that the article was an April Fool's joke. It came out around the first of April - and it's so absurd to put this forth as news that I found myself second-guessing the piece's seriousness. I mean, do we really need an AP article to explain to us that it can be traumatic to receive a mistaken diagnosis of cancer?!? Apparently, we do. And according to the piece, a new analysis of 23 existing studies encompassing over 300,000 women conducted by scientists from the University of North Carolina concludes that such false-positive results spur these distraught women to undergo even MORE hazardous mammography in their attempts to confirm or disconfirm the original test's finding… As you may already know, my life's research and experience have convinced me beyond any doubt that in the vast majority of cases, mammograms are less accurate than manual breast cancer screenings - and that the unnatural compression of the breast during mammography actually increases the spread of any cancerous tissues that may be present. So basically, they're worse than useless. They exist only to make mammography labs and radiologists money, and provide jobs for the radiation technicians. Honestly, that's my opinion of them. But I digress… We were talking about a mammogram study that focuses on the high levels of anxiety experienced by women who suffer from false positive breast cancer screenings. But this seems curious to me - since every mainstream doctor and major medical media outlet (including the AP, generally) holds the mammogram up as nearly infallible. To hear them trumpet the test's praises, there should NEVER BE a false positive! I can't sum it up any better than the study's lead author, who called the lasting effects of false-positive anxiety an "unnecessary consequence of poor medical care." Another expert source quoted in the AP article characterized mammograms as "imperfect tests." I'll second all of these sentiments. But this doesn't stop mammograms from "spreading" worse than the breast cancer they're supposed to be detecting… According to a MedicalNewsToday.com article, despite the fact that breast cancer mortality rates among Native American women are FAR LOWER on average than among white or black women under the Stars and Stripes, this hasn't stopped the IHS (Indian Health Service) from starting a new program to bring mammograms to the various Indian reservations of the western states. Using a mobile radiation unit and satellite-link imaging, technicians can now broadcast mammogram results to working radiologists at medical centers or hospitals hundreds, even thousands of miles away. In some cases, the results come back so quickly that follow-up fleecings - er, screenings, can happen the same day… Great. Soon the medical establishment can get Indian women up to the national average in breast cancer cases! And here I thought we stopped giving these folks the shaft more a less a century ago. | 
