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By Herb Newborg

Statistical Trickery Used to Present Research Data Causes Suffering, Disease and Death
Medical research is presented using deceptive manipulation of the actual data resulting in needless disease and suffering.

Western medicine relies heavily on convincing people that they need some sort of drug or surgery to remedy their ills and gain health. Studies often contain manipulated facts and skewed statistics that paint a favorable picture of some new procedure or treatment while shrouding the truth about the risks involved. The alleged benefits of breast cancer screenings are no exception as women are continually tricked into believing that mammograms will greatly benefit them when the facts show that they are largely ineffective.

Using an approach called “mismatched framing”, cancer studies will present side effects in absolute terms while exaggerating benefits in relative terms. When two different metric systems are used to present one set of findings, the results are deceptive albeit technically true.

One widely touted statistic says that regular breast cancer screenings reduce the number of breast cancer deaths by 25 percent. While this may sound like a large amount, the truth is the actual research data cited shows that apart from screening, four out every 1,000 women will die from breast cancer; with screening, only three would die. The reduction from four to three represents the 25 percent statistic.

However the other half of the story is that 20 percent of those 1,000 women (or 200 women) who get screened will be unnecessarily treated with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Up to 500 of them will undergo a needless biopsy due to an inaccurate screening. These monumental risks are never mentioned alongside the glowing endorsements that deceptively use the 25 percent reduction figure to lure women into continual screenings.

Drug behemoth Pfizer uses the same deception promoting its Lipitor drug, claiming that those with multiple risk factors who take it will be 36 percent less likely to have a heart attack. When evaluated in absolute terms, two out of every 100 people who take Lipitor will have a heart attack; three out of every 100 people who do not take Lipitor will have a heart attack.

Drugs like Lipitor work by inhibiting the enzyme needed to manufacture cholesterol in the liver. However, these drugs also block the manufacture of important nutrients like CoQ10, which has been shown to benefit heart health. Another drawback of this class of drugs is debilitating muscle pain. Other side effects, according to the Physicians Desk Reference, include liver problems, nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain, headaches and skin rash.

The absolute increase in negative side effects among those who take Lipitor versus those who do not is not mentioned in context with the 36 percent reduction claim.

A study conducted by BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet found that about 33 percent of papers published in medical journals fail to use consistent metrics when presenting study findings. The result is a misrepresentation of the truth by the illness industry, drug companies, and the doctors and journalists who aid them in their deception.

Does the Radiation From Mammograms Cause Cancer?

Ever since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force took a look, finally, at the scientific evidence and announced new recommendations late last year for routine mammograms -- specifically that women under 50 should avoid them and women over 50 should only get them every other year -- the reactions from many women, doctors and the mainstream media have reached the point of near hysteria. Not getting annual mammograms, some say, means countless women will receive a virtual death sentence because their breast tumors won't be discovered. But what is rarely discussed about mammograms is this: the tests could actually be causing many cases of breast cancer.

In fact, a new study recently presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), concludes the low-dose radiation from annual mammography screening significantly increases breast cancer risk in women with a genetic or familial predisposition to breast cancer. This is particularly worrisome because women who are at high risk for breast cancer are regularly pushed to start mammograms at a younger age -- as early as 25 -- and that means they are exposed to more radiation from mammography earlier and for more years than women who don't have breast cancer in their family trees.

"For women at high risk for breast cancer, screening is very important, but a careful approach should be taken when considering mammography for screening young women, particularly under age 30," Marijke C. Jansen-van der Weide, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Radiology at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, said in a statement to the media. "Further, repeated exposure to low-dose radiation should be avoided."

Dr. Jansen-van der Weide and colleagues analyzed peer-reviewed, published medical research to investigate whether low-dose radiation exposure affects breast cancer risk among high-risk women. Out of the six studies included in this analysis, four looked at the effect of exposure to low-dose radiation among breast cancer gene mutation carriers. The other two studies traced the impact of radiation on women with a family history of breast cancer. The researchers took the combined data from all these research projects and then calculated odds ratios to estimate the risk of breast cancer caused by radiation.

The results? The high-risk women in the study who were exposed to low-dose mammography type radiation had an increased risk of breast cancer that was 1.5 times greater than that of high-risk women who had not been exposed to low-dose radiation. What's more, women at high risk for breast cancer who had been exposed to low-dose radiation before the age of 20 or who had five or more exposures to low-dose radiation were 2.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer than high-risk women not exposed to low-dose radiation.

The average woman has about a 10 to 15 percent chance of developing breast cancer if she lives into her 90s. On the other hand, the risk of developing breast cancer in a woman with a strong family history of the disease who has inherited one of the genes that predispose her to breast cancer is over 50 percent.

If We Attained 100% Compliance with Breast Cancer Screening

There are about 100 million women in the U.S over the age of 20. An estimated 10 million are considered at high-risk for breast cancer. If you increase the risk of breast cancer by 1.5 times in the 10 million at high-risk, the math suggests that you will CAUSE an additional 2.5 million cases of breast cancer through radiation exposure.

The proponents of low-dose mammography claim they will save 1 additional life out of every 1,000 woman that are screened. This means that in order to potentially save 200,000 lives, we will cause an additional 2.5 million cases of breast cancer in the process. This does not even take into consideration the very real possibility that low dose mammography may cause a large number of cases of breast cancer in women not considered at high risk, that millions of women are unnecessarily treated with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy or that millions will undergo needless biopsies due to inaccurate screenings.

Bottom line: any supposed benefit of early tumor detection using mammograms in young women with familial or genetic predisposition to breast cancer is offset by the potential risk of radiation-induced cancer. “Our findings suggest that low-dose radiation increases breast cancer risk among these young high-risk women, and a careful approach is warranted,” Dr. Jansen-van der Weide said in the press statement.

The Mammogram Scam Exposed

Incredibly, although it is rarely reported in the mainstream media, the new study follows on the heels of several others that have already sounded the warning that mammograms may cause breast cancer. For example, a Johns Hopkins study published earlier this year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that warned radiation exposure from annual mammograms could trigger breast malignancies in women with a strong family history of breast and/or ovarian cancers who have altered genes (identified as BRCA1 or BRCA2).

And it may not be only women with a familial risk for breast cancer who are at extra risk from mammography radiation. A report published in the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine found breast cancer rates increased significantly in four Norwegian counties after women there began getting mammograms every two years. In fact, the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been linked to an increased incidence of breast cancer.

If we spent just a fraction of the monies spent on breast cancer screening and treatment instead on education programs based on lifestyle modification to prevent breast cancer from developing in the first place, we could do much more to prevent the death and suffering caused by the disease without exposing millions of women to needless pain and suffering.

To learn more about what can be done to prevent breast cancer without drugs, radiation and surgery, please click on the link below: