Has anyone decided not to go for a routine mammogram?

[hattie43]

I'm curious to know . I have mine next week and will attend but last time was a nightmare as I was recalled and health anxiety went through the roof . Luckily no cancer . I was reading that about 30% of women don't attend Apparently mammograms don't pick up everything and aren't foolproof , but surely they are better than nothing .

You keep on saying this over and over despite having had the NHS’s own information pointed out to you.

It is simply not possible at present to predict the outcome for most breast cancers and therefore determine whether treatment is required. I know cancers are staged and graded. This doesn’t mean the prognosis is known.

Have you read the post by Poetry and Wine just upthread?

And your comment about some women not getting chemo so therefore they are not harmed… words fail me. I don’t understand how someone with first hand experience doesn’t consider surgery and radiotherapy to be harmful.

It's up to you.
I had a mammogram 8 weeks postnatally as I had a lump. I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer (different types!) in both breasts.
I have BRCA2 so there is a 50% chance that my DCs have it too. I will definitely be encouraging DD to go for mammograms.
It was uncomfortable for me, but the treatment for cancer was too, and I'd give anything to be around for my DCs growing up.
That was 9 years ago, DCs are now 9, 12 and 15.

Yes, foregoing chemo can also kill. I have sad examples of this in my friendship group. We can’t know that chemo would have made the difference but it was recommended and made a big difference to the outcomes.

I agree with@WiseUpJanetWeiss

The stage of a cancer reflects how big the primary tumour is and how far the cancer has spread. The grade reflects how aggressive the tumour is. Both contribute to the prognosis. High grade tumours often have a propensity for micro metastases - ie they may have spread through blood or lymph and started to seed in distant locations, but those seeds are not visible on scans. Left unchecked, these are what kill. So chemo or other systemic treatment is recommended to knock them out. It is often very successful.

But the predictions that can be made from stage and grade are far from perfect.

what is "chilling" about a mastectomy?

Mastectomies are optional you know, nobody is forced to have one against their will. You get the information about your particular type of cancer, and you are told the treatment options, and you decide for yourself.

If you don't want a mastectomy, that is entirely your decision

If your cancer isn't aggressive, then it probably isn't a routine option offered anyway, and you would have to go out of your way to ask for one

@Nimbostratus100 I don't think you're discussing in good faith now. A mastectomy is major surgery. If a woman is told she has cancer, all the same emotional manipulation and bullying that gets thrown at women for attending screening is there for surgery and treatment. And then women have to tell themselves they needed the surgery. That it was life-saving. Because the psychological impact of the word cancer is huge, and having your secondary sex characteristics operated on unnecessarily is unthinkable.

Either you completely lack empathy, or you're so caught up in making your point, you've forgotten it.

The " overtreatment" referred to on here is probably DCIS. Often described as pre cancerous. Not often visible on mammogram and asymptomatic.
Not usually treated with chemo, often just surgery.
My cancer was a lump, very small but visible on scan. The mammogram didn't detect any DCIS. When the lump was removed and analysed it was found to be a small but very aggressive cancer. They also found extensive DCIS.

I'm not a risk taker anyway but I would rather be treated than ignore a DCIS.
Most women have lumpectomy rather than mastectomy. Frankly I'd rather be alive than keep a breast for cosmetic reasons. I asked the surgeon to do mastectomy as I wanted no risk of leaving any cancer. However she was very persuasive that the outcome for me would be the same with a lumpectomy.

Been following. Had triple neg and Paget's disease 5 years ago. Have had a double mastectomy, no recon, chemo and radiotherapy. I went through this rollercoaster to be here for my children and DH. I appreciate the life it has given me after treatment.

Most importantly though I really don't think you know how you would react when you are told you have cancer unless you have been through it. You can't know which treatments or surgery you will say yes to. I trusted my team and just desperately wanted to survive it. I have side effects but I would much rather be flat and have those than the alternative.

@IceFair we're not talking about dcis. HTH.

Thermography has not been shown to be an effective tool for breast cancer screening

You keep saying you would go private. Is this your get out of jail free card? It sounds rather smug tbh. Many women have no option to get private healthcare

Women are not capable of understanding what they are being told ????
Your comments here sound patronising to say the least.

You are talking nonsense. All the staging and grading of breast cancers is meaningless, according to you? What are your qualifications for stating this?
would you say that staging and grading of other cancers eg bowel, lung, is also worthless??

Well done Arctic skewer and wise up Janet Weiss. You have pushed your misinformation and kept the thread going very well, even keeping on when some posters have clearly been through breast cancer treatment.
Shame on you

Have you even read this thread? Plenty of examples right here.

Misunderstandings about what the leaflet says, for starters. And that's the people who read the leaflets.

Total misunderstanding about what overtreatment actually means ... no, not a biopsy. It means having a breast unnecessarily removed and/or chemo and/or radio and/or other treatments such as tamoxifem.

Information not misinformation.

If you think anything is actually incorrect, please do correct the NHS sources it comes from.

Oh yeah I’ve read the thread. You are so arrogant. You are manipulating the thread. As I said way back …. Don’t think anyone with breasts thinks like you..

you are enjoying telling people that they might have to undergo surgery and that it might be unnecessary.

@JussathoB @WiseUpJanetWeiss is not in any way saying that our current staging and grading tools are meaningless. Far from it! But they have significant limitations.

We have overall great results like ‘90% of women with early stage Type Blah breast cancer will be alive in five years’. That is based on the power of grading and staging based analysis. But the other 10% represent thousands of women per year world wide, and no one knows why their early stage Type Blah breast cancer returns and spreads. (In this example Type Blah is a low grade or less aggressive tumour.) So doctors may have a tendency to over treat.

A genetic signature has recently given us, for the first time, assurance that in certain cases there is virtually no risk that a certain tumour will return or spread. That is a huge leap forward. It provides the clear knowledge that some women do not need further treatment.

What misinformation? Is the NHS website misinformation?

Remind me ... how many women have unnecessary treatment for every woman who has necessary treatment after a routine mammogram ...(let's use nhs stats from the leaflet)?

I'm not enjoying that stat. It's why I don't have routine mammograms. Apparently many women are totally unaware of that stat, despite it being in the leaflet the nhs send out. That's hardly my fault. You want them to remain ignorant of that fact ... why is that?

You are giving misinformation

I don’t want women to remain ignorant of anything and never said I did.

Excuse me but wise up Janet Weiss said that cancers are staged and graded but this does not mean the prognosis is known.
That post suggests that the staging and grading is not linked to the prognosis. That is misinformation or a downright lie

@JussathoB Staging and grading are important tools for prognosis, some of the best we have. In my view @WiseUpJanetWeiss is saying this.

But they aren’t perfect. That is why a small percentage of people with good prognostics get a bad surprise. Where to draw the treatment line based on prognostics is a very difficult question. Both the importance of staging and grading, and their limitations as prognostic indicators, are true across the other cancers you mentioned as well. And it works both ways: some people recover fully from highly aggressive advanced cancers. That isn’t well understood either.

Genetic testing like the results from last year that I mentioned offers more certainty based on rigorous experiment. It will take a while to work its way into patient care but it is very exciting

Let me try and put this in words of no more than two syllables.

All cancers are staged and graded. In some cases this shows that the cancer is extremely likely to spread, or already has spread. In this case treatment is necessary to prolong life or maybe even “cure” the cancer.

In other cases the Drs just don’t know. They can’t tell whether the apparently low grade tumour is going to do nothing for the next 40 years or whether it is going to spread. If it is going to do nothing there is obviously no need for treatment. If it’s going to spread it’s going to need treatment. But they don’t know which is which.

So currently treatment is recommended.

And the NHS leaflet says that if four women are treated, one needed to be treated and three did not. The below in bold is a direct quotation.

Overall, for every 1 woman who has her life saved from breast cancer, about 3 women are diagnosed with a cancer that would never have become life- threatening.

Researchers are trying to find better ways to tell which women have breast cancers that will be life-threatening and which women have cancers that will not.

That’s a fact. That’s not misinformation. If you have evidence to the contrary please post it.

I don’t want women not to be able to have screening if they want it. I do want women to be able to make their choices based on fact.

When we get to the point that Poetry describes above the odds of harm vs. benefit change and I may well attend screening in the future. We are not there yet.