There was something charming about the innocence of the independent task force. Did the scientists assume the public would just accept the information as given? Or, should I say, as revised? Anyone who has spent time in a waiting room with women taught to equate early detection with prevention could have warned them.
Within hours, stories poured in from women who deeply believe “my life was saved” by an early mammogram. Then came suspicions about what new guidelines would mean to their insurance providers. Women recoiled as well from an analysis that listed “anxiety” as a risk component of early mammograms—as if they couldn’t handle a little A in preference to a big C.
If the experts didn’t realize how women would react, they were truly disconnected from the poisonous political atmosphere around health care reform. Quickly and deliberately, politicians turned “recommendations” into “rationing.” As Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., darkly warned, “This is how rationing begins. This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.”
With younger women with breast cancer, survival depends on how aggressive the tumor is, now how big it is, and unfortunately, survival rates have hardly budged:
It’s important because—and I say this as someone whose mother, aunt and sister have all had breast cancer—the task force had a strong story to tell. The benefits of mammography for younger women have been oversold. As Laura Nikolaides of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and a cancer survivor, says, “People have been doing mammography as a security blanket: If you have a mammogram, you won’t die of breast cancer. We wish that were true.” The biology of the tumor—how aggressively it grows—is now judged more important than the size at which it was discovered. And the terrible reality is that we haven’t done much to change the survival rate of younger women who get this disease.
No comments:
Post a Comment