Breast self-exams do not cut breast cancer deaths
 

Regular breast self-examination does not reduce death from breastcancer and may actually have a harmful effect by increasing thenumber of biopsies performed for benign disease, suggests ananalysis of data from two large studies.

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The heading is too mis-leading. Every living being on this earth will die eventually. No medical miracles can prevent the unavoidable fate. But the diagnosis and treatment of cancer resulted from the early discovery during self-exams will give us longer time to fight, better chance to survive.

I would think that statistic have some bias because when the tumor can be found by breast self-exam, it is usually more than 1 cm or much larger. And the reason why many of them die in those two countries is probably because no routine mammagram and/or doctor's exam is available.

Surely one can not be depending solely on breast self-exam to hope for reduced death rate.