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A Case for Thermography
Medical x-ray: responsible for approximately 75 percent of the breast-cancer problem in the United States.
For some reason mammography-centric medicine has completely overlooked the much safer thermal and infrared imaging technologies…
Further no comments are made regarding dangers of x-ray exposure.
Mammography: “The benefit is marginal, the harm is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous…”
“…Mammograms increase the risk for developing breast cancer and raise the risk of spreading or metastasizing an existing growth,” says Dr. Charles B. Simone, a former clinical associate in immunology and pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute. “…the annual mammography screening of 10,000 women aged 50-70 will extend the lives of, at best, 26 of them (.0026%); and annual screening of women in their 40s will extend the lives of only 12 women per year (.0012%).”
In a Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of tumours detected by mammography weren’t tumours at all. These “false positives” aren’t just financial and emotional strains, they may also lead to many unnecessary and invasive biopsies. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of all positive mammograms do not, upon biopsy, show any presence of cancer. Remember also that it takes 8 to 12 years for a “tumour” to be detected by x-ray.
An allegation that breast screening is being over-promoted to women who are not being alerted to the harm that can result was published in the British Medical Journal several years ago (approximately mid-1990s).
Hazel Thornton, a former breast cancer patient and visiting fellow at the University of Leicester, and Michael Baum, emeritus professor of surgery at University College, London, and a long-time critic of screening, have teamed up with a colleague to demand information for women that sets out the risks and benefits. They cite evidence showing 1200 women would have to be screened for 14 years to save one life from breast cancer while during that time scores would suffer anxiety, surgery and mastectomies for suspicious lumps that turned out to be benign.
In 1978, Irwin J.D. Bross, Director of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research commented about the cancer screening program: “The women should have been given the information about the hazards of radiation at the same time they were given the sales talk for mammography”…A jump to the exposure of a quarter of a million persons to something which could do more harm than good was criminal and it was supported by money from the federal government and the American Cancer Society.”
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) was warned in 1974 by Professor Malcolm C. Pike at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. A number of specialists concluded that “giving women under age 50 a mammogram on a routine basis is close to unethical.” REPEAT: The experts in the government were told not to do this to healthy women in 1974! The warning was ignored then and continues to be overlooked. The NCI Director at that time later left government service and took a high paying position at ACS.
“Over 280,000 women were recruited without being told that no benefit of mammography had been shown in a controlled trial for women below 50, and without being warned about the potential risk of induction of breast cancer by the test which was supposed to detect it…in women below 50…mammography give no benefit…”Mammography was known to cause cancer but the media and the “health officials” in the government stayed silent! The mammography policy pushed by the American cancer Society to fill its bank account remained the US government policy for ten years before a massive Canadian study showed conclusively what was
known 20 years earlier (1972) but what was not in the interests of ACS and NCI admit: X-raying the breasts of women younger than age 50 provided no benefit and probably endangered their lives.
In 1992, Dr. Samuel Epstein “…The high sensitivity of the breast, especially in young women, to radiation induced cancer was known by 1970. Nevertheless, the establishment then screened some 300,000 women with x-ray doses so high as to increase breast cancer risk by up to 20 per cent in women aged 40-50 who had mammogram annually, women were given no warning whatever; how many subsequently developed breast cancer remains uninvestigated.” “…Additionally, the establishment ignores safe and effective alternatives to mammography, particularly trans-illumination with infrared scanning.”…For most cancers, survival has not changed for decades. Contrary claims are based on rubber numbers.
Mechanical pressure used in mammography can spread cells that are already malignant (as can biopsies). In 1995 the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, reported that, since mammographic screening was introduced, the incidence of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which represents 12 percent of all breast cancer cases, has increased by 328 percent, and 200 percent of this increase is due to the use of mammography. This increase is for all women: Since the inception of widespread mammographic screening (beginning in 1983), the increase incidence of breast cancer for women under the age of 40 has gone up over 3000 percent.
Mammogram interpretation is often wrong. In 1996, the journal Archives of Internal Medicine published results of a test of 108 radiologists throughout the United States. The test used a set of 79 mammograms where the diagnosis had been verified by subsequent biopsies, surgeries or other follow-up. The radiologists missed cancer in 21percent of the films, thought 10 percent of the women with no breast disease had cancer and thought 42 percent of benign lesions were cancerous.
Digital reading of mammograms only improves the situation minimally; other radiation techniques such as MRI also have risk. Ultrasound first may offer safer testing.
For more research, please refer to the work of John Gofman, PhD, MD, emeritus professor of molecular and cellular biology, University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. John Gofman’s work implicates X-RAYS IN CANCER AND HEART DISEASE http://www.nirs.org/radiationassault/drjohn.html
PREVENTING BREAST CANCER - SECOND EDITION: 1996 This book uncovers the major cause of the recent breast-cancer incidence in the USA. The author shows that past exposure to ionizing radiation --- primarily medical x-rays --- is responsible for about 75 percent of the breast-cancer problem in the United States. http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/PBC/
