Great news ladies! Women under 50 not at risk anymore!

[monster]

Originally Posted by Cicero

"unnecessary treatment of cancers that would never become life threatening"

A little cancer never hurt right? Hey what doesn't kill me makes me stronger...Cancer is irrelevant unless it is fatal? oooh kay then.

Some tumors grow so slowly they have no effect on their host. So yes, some cancer tumors are irrelevant.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by monster

Some tumors grow so slowly they have no effect on their host. So yes, some cancer tumors are irrelevant.

Esp if you are 75 years or older, or so the government wants you to think. Because you know after the age of 75....

[monster]

Chemo and mastectomy are horrible things, with many permanent nasty side effects. if you have a tumor that is growing so slowly that it most likely won't cause you health problems until you're 200 and is not metastasizing, why in the hell would you undergo these procedures?

[monster]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Esp if you are 75 years or older, or so the government wants you to think. Because you know after the age of 75....

If I'm 75 and have a tumor that won't kill me in the next 25 years, I'll take the no treatment route. It has nothing to do with the government.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by monster

If I'm 75 and have a tumor that won't kill me in the next 25 years, I'll take the no treatment route. It has nothing to do with the government.

And if you think that the government should be telling you to ignore it and it kills you in 2 years and you never see you great grand children because you ignored it how do you justify it to your family?

To bad so sad?

[monster]

This recent "recommendation" is just the other shoe dropping IMO.

There has been plenty of research around for plenty of time suggesting that some cancer tumors are fine just left alone. And many are not. And the methods of telling which are which are improving all the time. But the current mindset is "kill all" just to be sure. Which would be fine if the killing of all was risk-free. It's the same mindset that wants antibiotics for everything, wants everyone to hand sanitize all the time, wants everyone to get a shot for the latest strain of flu, wants all men circumcised to prevent cancer.....

In some cases doing nothing is just fine. However this has nothing to do with the diagnostic tests.

It is imperative to know about what's going an and to have the information to decide whether this is a cancer one should do nothing about ....or not. Whether to screen and whether to treat are different arguments, though of course you can't treat if you don't screen...

[monster]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

And if you think that the government should be telling you to ignore it and it kills you in 2 years and you never see you great grand children because you ignored it how do you justify it to your family?

To bad so sad?

what in the hell are you waffling on about? I'll be asking the doctors not the government about when it's likely to kill me. And making my own decisions. ANd I won't have to justify anything to anybody. My greatgrandchildren wouldn't give a shit at that age, and i wouldn't be able to see them anyway if i'm having chemo, mastectomy and radiation which is bad abough at 42, never mind as 75.

You're such a panic-merchant.

[classicman]

I'm gonna make a guess here that the issue may be who is going to pay for what if you decide to get screened, have a mammo or surgery. I have no idea of the answer at this point, but thats what I was reading into his posts.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

And if you think that the government should be telling you to ignore it and it kills you in 2 years and you never see you great grand children because you ignored it how do you justify it to your family?

To bad so sad?

Or maybe "the government" will ignore the "recommendation". Oh look, they have.

Sebelius tries to debunk this right away: The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don't determine what services are covered by the federal government. ... Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.

The Obama administration says its mammogram policy is unchanged despite a U.S. panel's finding that routine tests aren't necessary for women in their 40s.

Yeah Democrats!

[monster]

Originally Posted by classicman

I'm gonna make a guess here that the issue may be who is going to pay for what if you decide to get screened, have a mammo or surgery. I have no idea of the answer at this point, but thats what I was reading into his posts.

well it certainly isn't the government that pays for it now....

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Or maybe "the government" will ignore the "recommendation". Oh look, they have.
Yeah Democrats!

So scientists are recommending something based on studies and numbers and stuff, and the politicians think it's political suicide to implement the changes recommended by the scientists. So they are simply ignoring the science. There ought to be a thread for posting examples of this sort of perverting of science for politics.

[Shawnee123]

Science? That's what you're calling using insurance actuary tables to determine if we should ignore this woman or that woman's tits?

mmmmmk!

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by glatt

So scientists are recommending something based on studies and numbers and stuff, and the politicians think it's political suicide to implement the changes recommended by the scientists. So they are simply ignoring the science. There ought to be a thread for posting examples of this sort of perverting of science for politics.

I don't think it is perverting science. The study says "only" 15% of women would have their cancer detected by screening in their 40's. ONLY 15%??????? That's quite a few lives, doncha think? We are not talking about epidemiology among squirrels here - these are human lives.

Robert Smith, director of cancer screening for the American Cancer Society, says his organization also is sticking with the current guidelines "because we not only looked at the evidence that the task force looked at, but we also looked at newer, modern data."

Smith says a good part of the current disconnect is due to the rules of evidence used by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. It's a rigorous system that values above all else the "gold standard" of large randomized trials of screening tests such as mammography.

That's all well and good, he says, but mammography screening has reached the point where these expensive trials are vanishingly rare — if not practically and ethically impossible.

Smith cites a very recent study from Sweden, where mammography has a long history and record-keeping is meticulous. It's not a randomized trial of mammography, but instead compares breast cancers diagnosed in different time periods among women who were screened for cancer with mammograms and women who weren't. "It includes hundreds of thousands of women examined over many, many years," he says.

Breast cancer deaths declined 19 percent over time among women who didn't get regular mammograms. But women who did get screening mammograms had a 48 percent reduction in breast cancer mortality.

That's very different from the U.S. task force's estimate. It says the evidence indicates that mammograms reduce breast cancer deaths by 15 percent among women ages 40 to 49.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=120562878

Originally Posted by glatt

So scientists are recommending something based on studies and numbers and stuff, and the politicians think it's political suicide to implement the changes recommended by the scientists. So they are simply ignoring the science. There ought to be a thread for posting examples of this sort of perverting of science for politics.

I dont think it is necessarily perverting science when policy makers evaluate the findings of one group of scientists to have more or less credibility or to be more or less in the public interest than another. It is the role of policy makers to make those choices.

To me, perverting science is when policy makers ALTER the findings of government scientists for political purposes.

In any case and in terms of government policies and recommendations, the HHS secretary made it clear that the currently accepted standards will prevail on this issue.

[Sundae]

In the UK the standard testing is every 3 years for women over 50.
I would be able to request testing from the age of 40 due to family circumstances (Grandmother died of cancer in her 60s, Mother had breast cancer in her 60s). I probably won't though.