Questioning the Reliability of Mammographies and PAP Smears

Loretta Friedman: Mammographies and pap smears and the new so called guideline, who they are really helping and should you do, that's today on BodBeat.

Hi I'm Dr. Loretta welcome to BodBeat. There are no such things as coincidences. Justice as congress has tried to roll out healthcare reform bill. The big five insurance companies are all under inditement for conspiracy and price fixing. Recently two noted medical groups released their guidelines for woman. Basically recommending we cut services for woman to have mammographies and pap smears. The American college of obstetricians and gynecologists now recommends that woman their first pap smear at age 21 and that woman 30 and older be tested every three years rather than annually, this comes on the heals of new guidelines by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force this is an government sponsored group that now says mammography screening should start at 50 rather than 40 and that woman over 50 only need to screened every two years. I don't know about you but I think any excuse the insurance companies can come up with to decrease services and increased premiums is what this is really all about. These new reports are used by Federal and State agencies private sector professional society health delivery system provider payers and others committed to evidence based healthcare.

So if someone tells you that these new guidelines aren't going to affect your choices they are wrong, they are really, really wrong. These, here are the statistics over a 190,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer of diagnosed every year. Over 40,000 deaths from breast cancer occur every year. Breast cancer is the most common cancer among woman in the United States other than skin cancer. It is a second leading course of cancer death in woman after lung cancer. The chance of woman having invasive breast cancer sometime during her life is a little less than one in eight. The chance of dyeing for breast cancer is about 1 in 35. Breast cancer deaths have been going down this is probably a result of finding the cancers early embedded treatment there are 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the United States. So here is the problem many doctors will take these recommendations to much to heart and do less listening then they should to woman who find suspicious lumps in their breast, and many woman will die. While the two sets of recommendations are unrelated the committed time of intense debate over the health care reform. Mammograms in particular have drawn broad attention in congress reflecting a more than decade long debate in the cancer community by how best to perform mammographies. Lets remember the research is a process and it take to considerable amount of time to draw conclusions with confidence lets take a breath and get it raise before making irresponsible recommendations that will kill woman, I want to hear from you give us your thoughts at BodBeat. Plus follow us on tweeter.com/bodbeatshow until then we will see you next week, thanks for watching.


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