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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (11984)	11/30/2009 1:09:39 PM
From: Lane3	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

So how could self-examination be a factor in our higher cancer survival rate? I'm quite sure I didn't assert it was. I don't know where you got that idea. Let me be clear. I doesn't seem likely that self-examination raises our cancer survival rate compared to Europe. I don't know why you would challenge that. Whether or not self-exam is a factor in the overall comparison of survival rates is irrelevant to the question. Let me refresh the question. It was about mammograms done on forty something women in the US and the extent to which discarding that practice would reduce the overall US survival rate. It was alleged that it would be reduced by 11 percent on the basis that the overall European survival rate is that much less than the overall US survival rate. That is a ridiculous claim. We already know what the reduction in US survival rate would be if forty-something mammograms were discontinued. You may recall the report that said one US woman is saved per something just under 2000 mammograms. Presumably that factoid was calculated from the actual the number of women were have been saved by those mammograms. Somewhere out there that number of women is known. Somewhere out there the overall survival rate from breast cancer is known. So you can easily calculate the change to the overall survival rate if the forty-somethings had not survived. Duh. There is nothing to be gained by looking at European breast cancer cases even if we had data on the European women who might have been saved had they had mammograms in their forties. It's like calculating a pitcher's ERA from the average game attendance. The only thing you could possibly say is bogus is attribution of ALL the difference in American vs European survival rates to mammograms performed in womens 40's. Indeed. Funny you should mention that because that what I've been arguing. Not that it's "possibly bogus" but it's preposterous. We simply can't quantify the benefit to a high degree of accuracy. We can and we did. They claimed one woman saved per 2000 mammograms. Had the author stuck with that she would have been fine. But she claimed a precise percentage change in survival rate based on mismatched European data. That was my complaint. That was bogus. But we can be sure such women who weren't diagnosed early went on to have lower survival rates as a result of not being diagnosed early. Or course. We have data claiming one life saved per 2000 mammograms in the US. It's clear that they save lives in the US. Presumably they would do so at approximately the same rate in Europe if they were to start testing younger women. That was never in question. It was the trip down the garden path to Europe to make a claim of 11 percent that I have arguing all this time. Again, you seem to be so stubborn on this point I'm glad I was, because it seems that you're finally starting to focus. "It" is that 1) early mammograms in the US save some lives, 2) stopping them would cost some US lives, 3)looking at overall survival rates in Europe tells us nothing about how many lives or to what extent stopping those early mammograms would reduce overall US survival rates, and 4) claiming that last point is bogus.