One thing about the treatment of breast cancer I don’t understand is why they try to save the breast at all, when there is such danger to the LIFE of the woman. I’d think that at the first sign of it they’d take out the breast tissue immediately. All of it. Right now, before it spreads into the bone. Replace it with an implant or be flat-chested but for God’s sake, be ALIVE. What am I missing here? This has always baffled me.
They don’t do mastectomies on all women because it turns out that you can identify groups of women where the mastectomy helps and others where it provides no benefit.
Breast cancer doesn’t kill you by growing into the chest wall, now it is very uncommon to see that. The problem is that the cancer cells get into the blood stream and move to far points in the body. Unfortunately, this can happen when the tumor is still quite small and apparently contained in the breast tissue. In this case, removing the breast does nothing for long term survival but removing the tumor (lumpectomy) does improve short term survival.