New Proposed Changes to Mammogram Guidelines - Page 4

Midwest Alice · 12-06-2009, 03:13 PM

What is Faux news channel and what does it have to do with this discussion?

Or maybe I should ask you, gdpawel, to stay on topic.

PinkGirl · 12-06-2009, 04:43 PM

I think Faux News is a play on words of Fox News. There's been mention
of CNN, Fox News, 60 Minutes, The New York Times etc. etc. .... so this
is not exactly "off topic" ... and even if it were off topic, I think we're
allowed to do that here ... go off topic ....

Midwest Alice · 12-06-2009, 05:50 PM

Oh I get it, just a pot shot at Fox news!
That gdpawel, always adding a little spark to the discussion.

Off topic is ok...

We put up two big Christmas trees at our home. My son came home sick from college today. I have to nurse him back to health he has finals this week! Hilary Clinton and Rober Gates were on three of the four Sunday news shows?

This is a game. See if you can guess which ones? I always tape all 4 because some are on at the same time or overlap.

OK I will get you the 4 to pick from to make it easier.

A. Meet the Press
B.This Week With George Stephanopoulos
c. Face the Nation
D. Fox New Sunday

Come on gdpawel, you want to play?

PinkGirl · 12-06-2009, 06:07 PM

I know, I know. It was Face the Nation, Meet The Press
and This Week with George Steph...... I'm a quiz answering
fool ...

Midwest Alice · 12-06-2009, 06:18 PM

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!! Pink Girl is the winner!

Carolyns · 12-07-2009, 02:16 PM

If getting political will keep me alive then I am up for grabs. Fighting Stage IV is no game show and with all of the talk about the cost of end of life care I am hoping that we could get the Right to Life folks working for us the way they did for Terry Schiavo (may she rest in peace). I don't know what her end-of-life request would have been but mine is not to end my life by saying the drugs I take are too expensive.

This topic keeps me up at night and I am love Brenda's saying, "I would rather be ancecdotally alive than statistically dead"

Jackie07 · 12-08-2009, 06:39 AM

The dust is settled:

[The links have been listed on the 'Breast Cancer Newsfeed']

http://www.healthcentral.com/breast-...425488-98.html

http://www.healthcentral.com/breast-...425492-98.html

I'm glad [and proud] to have participated in this important debate. This is probably the first time that I have experienced first hand [that I might have a hand in it

] the power of advocacy. "What a [wonderful] feeling!"

gdpawel · 12-08-2009, 07:17 AM

Health care is built around the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors devote a great deal of time and money to their medical education and patients seek out their expertise.

This bill is a perfect example of Congress disrupting this important relationship by placing it between you and your doctor. Remember, Wendell Potter was a corporate bureaucrat who stood between you and your doctor (although he own up to it).

So, between the government bureaucrat (what you see is what you get) and the corporate bureaucrat (who hide behind the veil of freedom, choice and non-bureaucracy but who are really just bureaucrats with different masters), they are still coming between you and your doctor.

StephN · 12-08-2009, 12:54 PM

Seems to me that all this ire and subsequent debate indeed had the effect of RAISING AWARENESS.

I have had more people talk to me about this who knew I am a long term BC patient, but never went into the details. They suddenly became interested and indeed learned some things.

Some of those people I talked with contacted their congress people. The controversy snowballed!

gdpawel · 01-12-2010, 11:12 AM

Wall Street Journal's Alicia Mundy reported that the final health care bill in Congress is likely to require coverage for more mammagrams than the US recommended after women's groups, doctors and imaging equipment makers stepped up pressure on lawmakers.

From the article:

Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor at Georgetown University's medical school in Washington, D.C., said the evidence supports less-frequent mammograms. "You have to ask if there's conflict of interest, because breast-cancer advocacy has become a big business," she said.

Ties between nonprofits and companies have been under attack by some consumer watchdogs. Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, sent letters last month asking 33 major nonprofit groups including the American Cancer Society to disclose their industry funding.

The American Cancer Society said it has received less than $1 million from screening-device makers in the past five years. Its spokesman said the donations, which are small relative to the society's annual revenue of more than $1 billion, don't influence its recommendations.

The American College of Radiology, a trade group, called the new government guidelines scientifically unfounded, and said that if the guidelines are adopted, "two decades of decline in breast-cancer mortality could be reversed and countless American women may die needlessly."

Its flagship research program studies the role of radiology in medicine. It received donations of at least $1 million each from General Electric Co.'s GE Healthcare and Siemens AG, according to the trade group's 2007-08 annual report. Both companies make mammography equipment and MRI scanners. Several other medical-device makers donated at least $100,000.

A spokesman for GE said the new guidelines conflict with successful early-screening programs. A representative of Siemens didn't respond to a request for comment. The college of radiology said sponsors haven't influenced its research. It has spent $480,000 on lobbying in the past two years, while the imaging industry spent more than $2.5 million.

One of the largest breast-cancer-awareness groups, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has worked with GE and other companies. Komen turned to GE in October when it lit the Great Pyramids pink to mark a major screening initiative in Egypt. Neither GE nor the Komen group would say how much the event cost.

In 2007, GE sold limited-edition pink cameras to Home Shopping Network, which donated a portion of the sales to Komen. Imaging and film companies whose products go into mammography equipment have made pink DVD players, pink computer flash drives and pink cellphones, a portion of whose sales raise money for Komen and other breast-cancer groups.

In events at the Capitol, Komen for the Cure founder Nancy Brinker has praised GE's digital mammography technology, and she received a public-service award from the company.

Ms. Brinker, sister of the late Susan G. Komen, said some patient-advocacy groups tended to represent industry views, but her organization's push has always been early detection.

A traveling mammogram van purchased this fall by the American Cancer Society, Komen and other advocacy groups for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston touts a new GE Healthcare Senographe Essential digital-mammography system.

A lobbying group leading the charge in Washington against the new guidelines is the Access to Medical Imaging Coalition, whose members include GE and Siemens and several nonprofit patient groups, the college of radiology and leading doctors societies.

The coalition's director, Tim Trysla, is a lobbyist at a Washington law firm. He has been working in Congress against proposals to cut billions of dollars in Medicare spending in the health-overhaul bill that could hurt imaging-device makers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126325763413725559.html

gdpawel · 01-13-2010, 11:33 AM

The storm that greeted the USPSTF guidelines on mammography screening for women in their 40s prompted the Senate to insert a mandate in its health care reform bill that every insurer cover every mammography screening test at no cost to beneficiaries.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article, "The Benefits and Harms of Mammography Screening: Understanding the Trade-offs," reminding physicians and women about the serious health costs of adopting that policy.

The authors, Dartmouth's Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, used the "number needed to treat" analysis to point out:

Without screening, 3.5 of 1000 women in their 40s will die of breast cancer over the next 10 years (ie, 996.5 of 1000 will not die of the disease).

Screening reduces the chance of breast cancer death from 3.5 to about 3 of 1000. In other words, 2000 women between 40 and 49 must be screened annually for the following ten years to save one life.

For most women with cancer, screening generally does not change the ultimate outcome; the cancer usually is just as treatable or just as deadly regardless of screening.

Finding cancers that were never destined to cause symptoms or result in death is the biggest problem with mammography, especially among younger women. Since it is impossible to know which cancers caught early are benign, all are treated with surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or some combination. Overdiagnosed women undergo treatment that can only cause harm, and must live with the ongoing fear of cancer recurrence.

While only 7% of women believe there could be breast cancers that grow so slowly that leaving them alone would not affect their health, randomized clinical trials have consistently shown that the groups undergoing mammography have more breast cancer, even after 15 years of follow-up. This persistent difference represents overdiagnosis.

Estimates of the rate of overdiagnosis range from 2 women overdiagnosed for every breast cancer death avoided in one trial, to 10 to 1 in another.

Woloshin and Schwartz concluded: "The politicalization of medical care is wrong. Promoting screening irrespective of the evidence may garner votes but will not create healthier voters. People need balanced information. Simplistic slogans touting only the benefit are deceptive. Simple, standardized summaries about the benefits and harms of testing would help foster good decision making."

gdpawel · 09-09-2010, 07:06 AM

A thoughtful piece was published in the New England Journal of Medicine about the miscommunication that took place last November of what the USPSTF tried to convey and the complicity of certain organizations in adding to that confusion.

http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=12525

Eddy · 02-19-2011, 07:22 AM

We are seeing the impact of the budgets cuts of the new elected republican congress that will allow the fat cats to increase their wealth at the expense of people. The beast defense for women in surviving breast cancer is early detection.

These republicans who claim the people of spoken fail to describe the people they are referring which is the insurance companies and their fat cat pals.

More emphasis should be placed on improved technologies that can pinpoint and detect breast cancers at their earliest stages. Research has shown that early detection provides the greatest opportunity for women to experience positive results from treatments.

Definitely a step backwards for all.