Posted on 11/16/2009 2:50:45 PM PST by earlJam
11/16/09
Most women should start regular breast cancer screening at age 50, not 40, according to new guidelines released Monday by an influential group that provides guidance to doctors, insurance companies and policy makers.
The new recommendations reverse longstanding guidelines and are aimed at reducing harm from overtreatment, the group says. It also says women age 50 to 74 should have mammograms less frequently — every two years, rather than every year. And it said doctors should stop teaching women to examine their breasts on a regular basis.
The new report conflicts with advice from groups like the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology. They are staying with their guidelines advising annual mammograms starting at age 40....
The cancer society, in a statement by Dr. Otis W. Brawley, its chief medical officer, agreed that mammography had risks as well as benefits but, he said, the society’s experts had looked at “virtually all” the task force and additional data and concluded that the benefits of annual mammograms starting at age 40 outweighed the risks.
Congress requires Medicare to pay for annual mammograms. Medicare can change its rules to pay for less frequent tests if federal officials direct it to...
Private insurers are required by law in every state except Utah to pay for mammograms for women in their 40s.
But the new guidelines are expected to alter the grading system for health plans, which are used as a marketing tool. Grades are issued by the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a private nonprofit organization, and one measure is the percentage of patients getting mammograms every one to two years starting at age 40...
Researchers worry the new report will be interpreted as a political effort by the Obama administration to save money on health care costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If there is a family history of breast cancer thats another story. Then I'd probably get one. That would be common sense...
I had a friend that died of breast cancer at the age of 32. Are they saying younger women don’t get breast cancer?
Already starting to try to teach us to love rationing.
You cannot fathom how angry I am right now...
The government SOB’s DON’T want women doing self exams and finding those lumps that needs COSTLY investigation. Rather have women die FROM A TREATABLE CANCER!!!
That line about the self exam HAS TO BE A MISPRINT. No rational human would say that.
My 36 year old daughter went in for a mammogram about a month ago. A lump turned out to be a fat deposit. During the exam, her doctor noticed a small growth on her back so she ordered further tests.
After a weeks worth of of various tests and scans, they inadvertently discovered a spot on her liver.
To make a long story shot, in two days, she going in for surgery to have a golfball size growth removed from her liver.
I strongly suspect that had all of this taken place after Obamacare, the growth on her liver may not have been discovered and it may very well had killed this mother of 3, dedicated wife of a vet, business owner and my only daughter and best friend.
I am not a forgiving man when it comes to placing my family in jeopardy. God help anyone responsible for the loss of one of my loved ones over this Obama scam.
From guys like me, there is no place to run, there is no place to hide, if you have hurt my family, period.
I can’t help but think that there are millions of dads just like me.... these nitwit dems are playing with fire.
New rules said that women can only get them on the third Monday of the month.
Welcome to the federal health care morass. health care applied with all the sympathy of the IRS.
Next 60 not 50.
My sister had breast Ca at 46.
Her son in laws first wife died at 24 of breaast ca.
They want to “avoid overtreatment”,,and let women die.
Why are the women not in arms over this.
Unless I’m mistaken, their decision was based on a study of patients in the British NHS. I think that is self explanatory.
“unless they are counting cost of the number of noncancerous lumps found and biopsied which wouldn’t be found until a biannual mammogram and seen as noncancerous on the x-ray.
That’s exactly what they’re doing: every form of breast cancer screening results in false positives that cost money and patient time to disconfirm. I think the premise here is that ASSUMING mammograms every 2 years, the value-added of breast self-exam is low. For every women who is spared a premature death, there will be hundreds or thousands of others who undergo avoidable biopsies, physician consults etc. So when everything gets toted up, we’d be effectively spending millions of dollars for each added year of life.
It’s a classic illustration of cost-ineffective care. If women want to spend their own money on more frequent mammograms or the follow-up care that results from monthly breast self-exam, all power to them. But we shouldn’t protect them from facing this trade-off by socializing the costs of cancer screening through private insurance or public insurance, because that just dumps the cost on everyone else.
Medicine is replete with examples like this. Obama vastly oversimplified the issue by talking about red pills and blue pills and acting as if all we need to do is eliminate care that confers zero medical benefits. In reality, most of the “excess” care in our current system does confer some benefits to patients, but the size of the gains in life expectancy or health status are too small to warrant the large costs required to achieve them.
You don't need death panels, if you just keep sick people from going to the doctor until it's too late.
Make no mistake, if your old, the democrats want you dead (especially if your white)
Depends on what kind of error you would endore. And that depends on who you are.
Fine and dandy to say there are too many false positives, biopsies, etc with mammograms and it is too costly if you are talking about a population.
But every woman I know would willlingly risk a false positive and a biopsy to avoid waiting on a cancer.
And that has to be taken into account.
Hubby is researching the group recommending this right now.All academics, nobody in practice who treats real people.
And you cannot say let the women pay for it if they wish. It would be differtent if the choice was fully explained and women could decide. But to pretend it is a better choice to delay mammograms is a lie. It is not a better choice. It is a cheaper choice.
Most women should start regular breast cancer screening at age 50, not 40
I know a woman who would be dead if she followed that advice.
I do too, I’m married to her. Under these guidelines my sons would have lost their mother while in grade school.
Thanks for your post 33. As usual, your analysis on such matters was most helpful in understanding the issue.
“I am not a forgiving man when it comes to placing my family in jeopardy. God help anyone responsible for the loss of one of my loved ones over this Obama scam.
“From guys like me, there is no place to run, there is no place to hide, if you have hurt my family, period.”
Thanks especially for that part of your post. I rarely see such sentiments posted but I have always thought that those politicians who enact such policies seem to have forgotten that there are severe consequences when such policies hurt or kill people’s loved ones. Some of those who love those persons and who see them hurt or die as a result of said policies are going to enact vengeance and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
I told my husband that they were getting us ready for Obamacare when I saw this on TV.
Great minds and all.....
I heard the same thing on Fox News just moments ago. Self-exams lead to false concerns which lead to wasteful trips to the doctor is how they are rationalizing it. Me, I’d rather women be safe than sorry. And, under our current private system, a woman going to her doctor to check out a lump isn’t taking anything away from anybody. When we have rationing and waiting lines, it’ll be a different story. Thanks in advance for wrecking our medical system, Obama and Democrats.
“But every woman I know would willlingly risk a false positive and a biopsy to avoid waiting on a cancer.
As I said, so long as these women also are willing to bear the financial costs associated with these false positives, I have no problem with this choice. Everyone has a different degree of risk tolerance and in a free country, I shouldn’t be imposing my risk preferences on women, but neither should women be imposing their risk preferences on me by offloading these costs on somebody else.
“All academics, nobody in practice who treats real people.
The reality is, figuring out how to balance the benefits and harms of any medical procedure is a statistical exercise best undertaken by those with the training to do it carefully and accurately. Most clinicians don’t actually have this training, so however skilled they might be at the bedside, this skill doesn’t qualify them to make an accurate judgment about what is best for the average woman.
Too many people have their judgment clouded by unrepresentative anecdotes: “Well my sister found a lump in her breast at age 43, so if she’d followed this advice, she’d be dead.” They’re conveniently forgetting the hundreds or thousands of women who went through the pain and anxiety associated with biopsies, X-rays or MRIs of what turned out to be false positives. Not only is this costly in economic terms, but unnecessary biopsies and X-rays pose hazards to health. The Task Force evenhandedly toted up all the lives saved from breast self-exams, along with all the lives lost due to measures taken in response to false positives and concluded that on balance, there’s no evidence that breast self exam leads to fewer deaths. Thus, their recommendation was based on balancing benefits and costs measured in terms of HEALTH, not dollars and cents. It’s perfectly legitimate to question the data they used, the assumptions they made, how they combined the evidence etc., but tossing out their conclusions on grounds they lacked clinical experience is no more legitimate than concluding that 2 + 2 can’t equal 4 because a bozo like VP Biden said it was.
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