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The Dangers and Futility of Mammograms

Dec 30, 2008 by TacticularCancer.com

In 1985, the Lancet, one of the five leading medical journals in the world, published an article condemning the mammography recommendations under which “Over 280,000 women were recruited without being told that no benefit of mammography had been shown in a controlled trial for women below 50, and without being warned about the potential risk of induction of breast cancer by the test which was supposed to detect it.”

Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, in the early 1990’s found that three-quarters of the annual incidence of breast cancer in the United States was caused by earlier ionizing radiation, primarily from medical sources. He did not under estimate the role played by pesticides, synthetic hormones, fatty diets and other environmental stressors, stating “There is no inherent conflict or competition between carcinogens,” because they multiply each other’s carcinogenic effects. Dr. Gofman abhorred the fact that although X-rays and radiotherapy were among the few environmental contaminants known unequivocally to cause many forms of cancer, they were routinely recommended and used with many cancer patients although there was no proven benefit to survival.

The media and the government health officials stayed silent regarding the mounting evidence that mammograms caused cancer, and the ACS and the NCI continued to recommend mammograms. In 1992 Samuel Epstein, professor at the University of Illinois Medical Center along with 64 other distinguished cancer authorities opposed this status quo thinking and warned the public about what the ACS and NCI were up to.

The next month, the Washington Post broke the story into the mainstream media, exposing what the ACS and the NCI had done to countless women for several years. In this article Dr. Epstein was quoted, “The high sensitivity of the breast, especially in young women, to radiation induced cancer was known by 1970. . . the establishment ignores safe and effective alternatives to mammography.” He saw this as a conscious, chosen, politically expedient act by a small group of people for the sake of their own power, prestige and financial gain, resulting in suffering and death for millions of women. He regarded them as committing “crimes against humanity”.

In December, 1992, the New York Times published facts about mammography and concluded that women were not being told the truth.

In 1995, the Lancet again blasted the ACS and NCI mammography scam by concluding: “The benefit is marginal, the harm caused is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous.”

Meanwhile, women’s health advocate Susan Weed began to publish her findings. In Breast Cancer? Breast Health! The Wise Woman Way, she reports that “scientists agree that there is no safe dose of radiation. Cellular DNA in the breast is more easily damaged by very small doses of radiation than thyroid tissue or bone marrow; in fact, breast cells are second only to fetal tissues in sensitivity to radiation. As an added risk, one percent of American women carry a hard-to-detect oncogene which is triggered by radiation: a single mammogram increases their risk of breast cancer by a factor of 4-6 times.”

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