My mother isn’t the only woman I know who won’t get a mammogram. A friend of mine from college also refuses this annual torture ritual, though her reason is very different. She believes that mammograms cause cancer. Sounds paranoid, I know, but it turns out she may be on to something.
A recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that cases of breast cancer skyrocketed after the women enrolled in the trial started getting regular mammograms. According to the article I read "The researchers were surprised to find that the incidence of invasive breast cancer was 22 percent higher in the group regularly screened with mammography. In fact, screened women were more likely to have breast cancer at every age."
The researchers even ruled out the possibility that regular screenings simply caught more cases of the disease. But the cause they did cite may surprise you.
They don’t necessarily think that mammograms themselves cause cancer. Instead, these researchers believe that "some breast cancer detected by repeated mammographic screening would not persist to be detectable by a single mammogram…the natural course of some screen-detected invasive breast cancers [may] be to spontaneously regress."
In other words, it may go away on its own!
Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that this is just one theory. The researchers fully admit that they don’t have any hard-and-fast proof that this occurs, and they warn that breast cancer is a serious disease that certainly should not be ignored. But their study does raise the question, once again, about just how reliable mammograms really are.
To read about the completely non-invasive breast cancer screening tool Dr. Wright recommends instead, refer back to the November 2008 issue of Nutrition & Healing. And if you’re not already a subscriber, the website also offers details on how you can become one. This is information no one should be without!
Amanda Ross is the Managing Editor of Dr. Jonathan V. Wright’s Nutrition & Healing newsletter.
You can sign up for the free eTips by visiting www.wrightnewsletter.com.
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