FAKE NEWS: Mammograms are destroying women’s health

Through mammograms, occult forces aim to make women ill, according to a conspiracy theory resumed these days on social media.

The witness who can no longer testify

NEWS: "MAMMOGRAPHY IS THE BIGGEST ORGANIZED CRIME AGAINST WOMEN!! ️Women who go for mammograms are probably not aware of the harm they are doing to themselves. A few details to consider before deciding to have one:

• 50-60% of "positive" results are incorrect!! So, while being diagnosed with "breast cancer", in 50-60% of cases it turns out that the cancer didn't exist at all!!
• during the examination, the breast is pressed with a heavy weight of 10kPa (1019 kg/m2) and then the healthy, very sensitive, mammary gland tissue is bombarded by radioactive rays!!
• it stimulates tumor growth and the spread of metastases!!
• a study on 690,000 cases showed that perfectly healthy women developed breast cancer after mammographic examinations!!!
• Switzerland is the first country in the world to ban mammography exams

So, the criminal medical mafia aggressively enforces regular annual mammograms on healthy women to make them profitable patients!! Even my late mother, who dealt with it her entire career, realized towards the end of her life that she had been an unwitting accomplice in the greatest medical crime against women”.

NARRATIVE: The medical mafia forces women to have mammograms in order to make them sick and then profit from the diseases they cause.

CONTEXT: Among the more than 200 forms of cancer identified so far, the most common, in the case of women, is breast cancer. Its treatment is often associated with the loss of one or both breasts. According to the World Health Organization, as of 2021,  breast cancer has become the most common type of cancer globally , accounting for 12% of the oncological cases diagnosed annually. In Romania,  breast cancer is the main cause of mortality in women, this condition representing 16% of all deaths caused by cancer.

Currently, breast cancer can be detected in early stages with the help of medical procedures and, discovered in time, it becomes a treatable condition with a favorable long-term prognosis. The main method of examining women in order to detect breast cancer is mammography, a procedure that is recommended to be performed annually by women after the age of 40. It is a screening method that detects and analyzes microcalcifications, the only sign of breast cancer.

Despite this, there are several ongoing controversies regarding the benefits and risks of mammography screening. Different professional groups have published conflicting studies about when women can start the procedure, how often it should be done, and when it should be stopped. A study from 2000 by two Danish researches  argued that there was insufficient evidence to support the claim that mammography significantly reduced breast cancer mortality, but their analysis had been done by excluding six out of eight major studies related to mammography  and referred to overall mortality rather than breast cancer mortality.

One of them, Peter C Gøtzsche, later published an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, in 2015, concluding that because of the treatments given to patients with false-positive results on mammograms, the procedure would increase by one third their mortality rate. His consistently critical positions on mammography and the HPV vaccine eventually led to his dismissal as a professor at the University of Copenhagen and his exclusion from the staff of the "Nordic Cochrane" Research Centre, of which he was a founding member. The center's board of directors announced Gøtzsche's expulsion due to "disruptive and inappropriate behavior over several years, undermining the organization's institutional culture, to the detriment of its work, reputation and members”.

The narrative according to which mammograms do more harm than help initially appeared in the Romanian media as a result of its promotion by Olivia Steer, in 2016. Steer is well-known for her anti-medicine positions, claiming that diseases disappear by themselves or "helped" by a proper nutrition. At the same time, any medical act represents an attack on the sacredness of the body and does nothing but make the body even more sick.

Over the past two months, a post bringing back the 'mammograms cause cancer' narrative has been circulating on social media in multiple languages ​​( English, French, Polish, Slovak, Finish) and appears to have originated in the former Yugoslav space .  It has been picked up by several accounts that promote various forms of alternative medicine and therapies, some citing the original source, others assuming their "research" in the field and their results.

PURPOSE: To promote the anti-system discourse and validate the previously promoted conspiracy theories.

Fact: Mammography can detect cancer in its early stages

WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The claim that more than half of positive tests are actually false has absolutely no ground, for the simple reason that, in principle, cancer, regardless of its form, is not diagnosed solely on the basis of a single test, but following several tests, analyzes and medical procedures. In the case of breast cancer, it is never diagnosed on the basis of mammography alone, requiring other investigations. Basically, mammography is only the first step in detecting breast cancer. If the doctor has suspicions after performing the mammogram, other tests follow, such as biopsy or MRI, which accurately determine whether or not the patient has breast cancer.The claim that the breast is under a pressure of over 1,000 kilograms per square meter during a mammogram is completely false and isn’t based on any measurements. Mammography is done bilaterally, in two planes, for each breast separately, and thus, indeed, slight pain may occur, especially in the case of women with smaller breasts, because it is difficult to hold the breast between two plates due to its small size. Likewise, the hypothesis of irradiation that "stimulates tumor growth and spread of metastases" is nonsense. The radiation dose used in mammography is very low, being comparable to that used in a dental x-ray. Therefore, the associated risks are very small, and radiation exposure is not dangerous and cannot cause oncological conditions.

At this time, there is no study proving the occurrence of breast cancer in "completely healthy" women after mammography. It is obviously possible for the disease to appear between two mammograms, but this fact does not mean that the disease was caused by the previous mammogram. There is also the possibility of a "false negative" mammogram, when it looks normal despite the presence of breast cancer. In general, mammograms miss about 1 in 8 breast cancers, especially in women with dense tissue. Logically, like any other method in medicine, mammography has an error rate. But from a statistical point of view, the benefits of mammography far outweigh the risks, and this type of medical investigation is, at the moment, the most effective way of detecting breast cancer in its early, perfectly treatable stages.

The last statement is also the most absurd. Switzerland has not banned mammograms. The hypothesis is probably based on the recommendations of the Swiss Medical Council , a now-disbanded body, which proposed, 10 years ago, to stop regular mammography examinations . The institution did not represent the Swiss state, but was only a medical research center, and its conclusions were criticized by experts in the field, , who said they were based on wrong, incomplete or misinterpreted data. Today, in Switzerland, mammography is a procedure whose cost is covered by health insurance  and is recommended for women between the ages of 40 and 59 every year and for women between the ages of 60 and 75 every two years ”, according to the  Swiss Federal Office of Public Health.