"Recommendations from an independent panel that most women don't need mammograms in their 40s, and should get one every two years starting at 50 have spurred intense debate."
"Angry reaction to new government-funded guidelines on mammography has grown so hot that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, is trying to put out the fire."
These are the leads on two NPR stories today on the subject of new guidelines for breast cancer screenings done by mammogram. The reaction to this new information is not a medical one. It is a knee-jerk political debate that is harbinger of things to come; we will be having the same discussions about annual physicals into the next millennium that we have been having about climate change since the last millennium once the federal government gets involved. We will be lining up doctors and researchers on opposite sides of the aisle like we now do with climatologists and undereducated Nobel Prize winners.
Notwithstanding my long personal aversion to the whole "test people to death" mentality that is the root of our spiraling medical costs and cultification (to apparently coin a word that is not in my computer's dictionary) of certain ailments, I am totally disgusted at the politicization of this latest report. It and the fact that the local Catholic diocese sent $50,000 to the Maine anti-gay marriage campaign combined to raise my stress level over the past couple of days requiring extra chanting at yoga tonight.
What makes me crazy is that these issues cannot be generalized. What is good for one may be awful for another. Each of us needs to make an educated decision about what to do vis a vis our personal situation. Here is an example. Both of my grandmothers and their mothers before them lived well into their 80's (90's) with their breasts intact. My mother is now 73 and her sister 63. Same deal. I concluded long ago that I come from very breast healthy stock and chose to forego the risks (albeit relatively small, but unnaturally present nonetheless) associated with regular mammograms. I have had couple but that it is it.
Of course, we all seek validation and I got mine by reading Barbara Ehrenreich's controversial but straightforward treatment of the whole breast cancer issue "Welcome to Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads to a Cult of Pink Kitsch"
http://bcaction.org/index.php?page=welcome-to-cancerland-2 . To read her speech about the topic go to: http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/barehar.html.
That is not to say I am naïve about these things, only that I have made a decision that is right for my own situation. I know a woman who I admire very much for having the courage to undergo a prophylactic double mastectomy before even having children as her own grandmother succumbed at a very young age to a breast cancer death. She too made a decision that was right for her situation.
Such conclusions are drawn on the basis of reviewing all available information and appyling that guidance to one's own facts. We should take all the information into consideration and we should keep gathering information in a meaningful way-to wit, through objective data gathering. Sadly, the politicization of healthcare will do exactly the opposite. Mass hysteria over generalized reports does no one any good. Once we become politically correct about how we decide which data to collect and how to collect it, it will cease having any value whatsoever, thereby depriving each and every one of us the opportunity to make sound health decision.
The political objectification is not endemic to either the liberals or the conservatives. Both are guilty of doing that to amazing extremes that have real world consequences. In this example it is the conservatives who are making ridiculous hay with the issue by suggesting that the study is representative of the death panel components that will necessarily creep in to any public health program. Shame on them for tainting this data with the stupid suggestion that somehow there is a connection. There is absolutely no evidence that this study was conducted with that end game in mind.
Ironically, my conclusion is the same as the conservative position, though. Once the government gets into your body there is no freedom left. I wish to remain free to choose whether or not to have a mammogram. That is my right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness used to be the thing. This threat to my life by limiting my health care liberty and confusing the marketplace with political rhetoric over scientific information is not making me any happier than Al Gore is about the reaction to alleged climate change. But think of the energy I am saving by foregoing the annual tests!
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