Why New Guidelines Regarding Breast Cancer Are Dangerous and Discouraging

There has been quite a bit of discussion surrounding the recent recommendations by the United States Preventive Services Task Force that women should not receive mammograms before 50 unless they are high risk. In addition women are being urged not to perform self-exams as this might lead to false worry.

Personally, I have a problem with this. Being the daughter of a breast cancer survivor I feel strongly that women should have mammograms at age 40 or even earlier in many cases. My mom had breast cancer when she was just 45 and it was caught through a mammogram. There was nothing alarming to my mother and a normal routine mammogram discovered something that could have killed her. Luckily it discovered it in time. If she had waited the 5 extra years there is no telling how much it would have spread.

Breast cancer has taken many people I know. In my mom's case, watching a young aunt die of breast cancer was enough to prompt my mom to receive mammograms at the age of thirty. My grandmother did not have breast cancer. Does this mean my mom would not fall under the "high risk" group?

Advising women to not perform self-exams is not acceptable either. One of my dear friends sister had stage 4 breast cancer at the age of thirty. This lump discovered only by a self-exam and confirmed by subsequent tests. No family history and with a 5 year-old at home the last thing she thought was that she had breast cancer.

Not only did she have it but it was an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer that would have ended her life within months at most a year had she not discovered and had it treated. Many surgeries and many treatments later she is currently cancer free.

Then I also know some who were not so lucky. Some over 50 and some under. So why risk lives? A colleague of mine lost his 30-year-old cousin after she gave birth to her child. Her breast cancer exceptionally aggressive. Her choice was to terminate the pregnancy and begin treatment, which may or may not help or take a chance. She was not at risk, and even under 40. Yet she still died.

So how can we now turn to women and advise them not to perform self-exams or get mammograms? This all seems senseless to me. If it is to save a buck for insurance companies, I ask will it save money when thousands of women who could have had a test are lying in hospital beds dying? I don't think so. We came this far in the fight against breast cancer. Cancer that if caught earlier enough can oftentimes be treated with amazing success. Why look back?

If it is your mother, sister, aunt what would you suggest?