The team of H. Gilbert Welch, M.D., M.P.H. of the Dartmouth Institute has suggested that rather than an epidemic of breast cancer, we have an epidemic of over-detection, over-diagnosis and over-treatment of breast cancer. And it's occurring in screened healthy women, women who are being treated for cancers that would never have advanced or posed a health risk!
Welch's team estimates that over 1 million women underwent unnecessary breast cancer treatment in the last 3 decades of mammography screening, especially those diagnosed with DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ), a type of breast cancer that Welch and Dr. Laura Esserman and others argue should be renamed IDLE to represent the nature of these mostly indolent “idle” lesions. Their paper is here: Addressing overdiagnosis and overtreatment in cancer: a prescription for change. Here’s another one called Breast Cancer Screening: Is There Room for De-escalation? that makes it clear how many are harmed in the “gold-standard” process of breast screening.
“The problem here is that women are not being educated about the nature of DCIS or the concept of “non-progressive” breast cancers. There is still the black and white perception out there that you either have cancer, or do not have cancer.”
“Mild improvement” in pattern suggestive of unopposed estrogen in client who is monitoring her “cancer” (DCIS) with thermography!
This is a client who did her research after her diagnosis of DCIS and refused the “standard of care” which for her was surgery and radiation recommended for her DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) breast “cancer” diagnosed in January of 2021, a known low to no lethality breast “cancer” that shouldn’t even be labeled as cancer according to many doctors. This client has been doing “active surveillance” with thermography, MRI, mammography and ultrasound with her surgeons’s support.
She first called us after getting a report from a “fast-food” thermography clinic telling her that her breast with the DCIS had changed for the worse and to see her doctor but they couldn’t/wouldn’t say where in the breast no matter how much she pressed them and it certainly wasn’t visible in the low resolution photos on paper she had been given, and going back to her surgeon with no information wouldn’t work so she called around and got referred to us and her thermograms have been perfectly stable for 18 months until her last imaging which even showed “mild improvement” in the pattern she has suggestive of estrogen dominance, so that is fantastic! She has pain at the biopsy site that was not present prior to the biopsy. We see heat at the biopsy site. Wish we had images prior to the biopsy to see if the heat existed prior since the pain did not.
“We are finding smaller and smaller cancers that they couldn’t see 30 years ago. Now with their improved ability to see with digital 2D & 3D mammography today, healthy women have a good chance of undergoing surgery, radiation and or the chemo treatments. Mammography screening appears to lower mortality about .07%. Not much.”
Removing cold turtles going nowhere fast was estimated by H. Gilbert Welch in his 2012 meta-analyses to be about 1/3 of the breast surgeries in this country due to the extremely low thresholds of what pathologists are pushed to call cancer. If you don’t believe it, skip to the Q & A at the end of this video when a pathologist admits the pressure, but watch the whole thing to have your mind blown about Overdiagnosis in Cancer Screening. The part about breast cancer screening starts midway through at minute 32:00.
Most Women Die with Non-Lethal Breast Cancers and Don’t Even Know It! Welch says autopsies show us that most older women who die from causes other than breast cancer usually have breast cancers that never became a threat.
Roughly forty percent of women in their 40's, and fifty percent of those in their 50's & 60's, who die of other causes are found to have breast “cancers” (asymptomatic) at autopsy!
So all cancer is not created equal, some will even regress so these name games are unethical and put practitioners in terrible positions of knowing in their hearts that they are needlessly harming many to save a tiny few who actually have lethal cancer.
OHSU professor and pathologist, Karen Ho, was asked what she would most like to see in advances. “The ability to discern lethal from non-lethal cancers” was her wish, admitting essentially that they just can’t know looking at cells under a microscope. This fact is confirmed by Dr. Peter Gotzsche in his book.
What qualifies as breast cancer in the U.S. can be very slow growing, even regressing cancer will get aggressive treatment with built in harms. In Europe the threshold for what qualifies as “cancer” requiring treatment is much higher says Dr. H. Gilbert Welch.
According to Welch, mammography screening has had little to no effect in reducing aggressive metastatic cancer rates. "We need to find the cancers that matter," says Welch, "finding more cancer earlier is not necessarily better."
The elephant in the room is that since we know these cold, non-lethal cancers exist in high numbers, why isn’t high quality thermography being used to monitor them with “active surveillance” instead of harmful “treatment” as long as they remain cold and are not growing by any safe standards of testing?
Infrared thermography is the real enemy detector, a perfect-fit tool, ideal for discerning HOT aggressive tumors from IDLE cold ones, giving treating practitioners an objective, highly sensitive temperature measurement of a tumor’s surrounding metabolic increases or decreases in temperature.
How does one know overdiagnosis happens? It's like a black hole says Welch. "We can't see a black hole but we can infer its existence." His team's analysis of 9 trials of over 600,000 women show that early-stage cancer detection and treatment has skyrocketed while late-stage cancer detection never declined accordingly, the first requirement of a successful screening program. The second requirement is that a screening program must delay the time of death. Mammography fails both these requirements according to Welch, meaning many more people are getting treated for breast cancers that would never have affected their lives, plus, advancing the time of diagnosis is not delaying the time of death. But it definitely affects quality of life once a diagnosis of cancer is received, especially if the recipient doesn’t know they may have a harmless mass of slightly abnormal cells being sold to them as an imminent danger and threat requiring harmful aggressive treatment.
Is thermography uninvited to the biopsy table because it would rule out the need for way too many biopsies? Is there a hidden benefit to retaining a screening test with an 80% false positive biopsy rate (mammography)? Could annual radiation of these biopsy injury sites be seeding cancers?
In this study there is strong damning evidence that women receive lots of false positive biopsies and mammograms that lead to increased cancer risk for 20 years after a false positive finding!