You mean subtracting 79 from 90.
No, I mean the bogus underlying calculation formula that the decrease in overall US survival rate would logically be equal to the difference between the overall US survival rate and the overall European survival rate. (Gosh, I feel dumb even repeating such an absurdity. I am embarrassed for the author.)
I'm still more interested in the bigger point cuting back mammograms would increase breast cancer deaths.
And I'm not. If you cut the funding for forty-something women by one half, one additional woman in two thousand will die. That isn't in dispute nor is it surprising, sad, but not in dispute or surprising, ergo it's not interesting to me. (If we could find countervailing data, the number of women who die as a result of having had the mammograms, particularly if the rate were greater than two per thousand, leaving the net death rate in favor of not doing mammograms, now that would be interesting.)
1% is not valid.
I posted my formulas. Your only challenge to them has been that my bottom line didn't feel "important" enough to you. I "feel your pain," but, unless you find a flaw in my logic or my math, the formulas and bottom line stand.
When the chance of dying if you get breast is 5% with mammograms and 56% without that tells me the benefits of early mammograms is substantial and they have a big impact on the survival rate. Definitely more than the trivial 1% or wash you have been pushing.
I understand that it's counter-intuitive and unsatisfying, but reality, facts, and calculations sometimes tell us things that surprise and displease us. Cognitive biases and emotional thinking make it difficult to get past that. It's natural to believe what one wants to believe rather than what is.
Sounds pretty solid to me.
It may have been a solid study but one solid study of 7K people doesn't trump decades of National Cancer Institute data.
You're disputing a site you posted from now
I posted two links at the bottom of my post rather than embedding the links in the text. I thought that embedding them would be too clumsy. The disadvantage, however, is that it's not obvious which data came from which of my two links.
The only piece of my data from that site was "the overall rate of survival claimed for mammograms is 95%." I had difficulty finding that key piece of the puzzle and grabbed it from the first place I found it. I didn't even read the article since the precision of that particular number really didn't matter. If 95% was wrong, it would have been wrong on the high side, which was in your favor, so I didn't see a problem in using it in my argument.
The rest of my data came from the NCI site: seer.cancer.gov.
I apologize for any confusion that lack of source precision caused. Had I not included that link, you would never have been distracted by rest of the Roux article.
I only cited Roux as she was cited in the report on the study by the Harvard Medical school researcher.
"In the Breast Care Center last year, Roux said, a quarter of the diagnosed breast cancer cases were in women in their early 40s."
So, since Roux was mentioned by this researcher, magically the data from her little experience in her own little center takes on so much weight that it outweighs NIH official statistics for the US population at large? You have one little clinic for however many years it's been operating on one hand vs the total US population for decades on the other. You have one woman who got a mention from one researcher vs the weight of the NIH data gathering apparatus. You have one study against mounds of contradicting NIH data? And you choose the one woman with her one clinic and her one study? That's no way to evaluate data.
Brumar, the point of evaluating data and drawing conclusions is to learn if something is statistically significant and important and what to do about it if it is. You're deciding on an emotional level what's important and then trying to force the data into supporting that belief. That approach to priority setting and decision making may be comfortable for you on a personal level and may not yet have bitten you in the ass in any critical way but it's no way to run a railroad.
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