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

To: Brumar89 who wrote (12114)	12/7/2009 4:41:41 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 42652

You realize that you essentially doing that below by equating diagnoses in the forties with deaths in the 45-55 age group: Huh? I'm comparing the forty-something-at-diagnosis set with the same set five years later, at which point they are either survivors or dead. Same women five years later. the drop to 44% will still be substantial Yes, substantial for the cohort. Either way, though, the impact of substantial drop in a smallish cohort doesn't make a lot of impact on the overall. It makes a lot of difference for the individual women and the cohort but not for the overall stats. And it would still be misleading to characterize it as a wash. It's a wash when compared to 11%. We're talking orders of magnitude here. that doesn't tell you anything at all about the value of mammograms. Throughout this exchange there has been almost nothing in the data that speaks to mammograms. We have only the one in 2000 number that's particular to the impact of mammograms. You have ignored that throughout. In none of the overall numbers are diagnoses or deaths differentiated based on whether the diagnosis was based on a mammogram. That was one of my complaints about the assertion in the original article. It was one of the reasons she had no basis for her assertion. The two 15% numbers are just there to demonstrate that most women diagnosed at that age die. If about 15% get diagnosed and five years later about 15% die, then how many survivors are there? You don't even have to take your shoes off to count them. And that includes women who got mammograms. Being diagnosed young with breast cancer is pretty much a death sentence. If they catch it really early with a mammogram you have a chance. But even with a mammogram it's only a one in 2000 chance. They throw these eighty and ninety percent overall survival rates around to give women hope. You don't tell a woman just diagnosed that she has only one chance in 2000. It's just too depressing and counterproductive. But for young women there really isn't much hope. This is from a piece that advocates forty-something women getting mammograms. It's an honest piece. You don't have to skew the facts to advance the notion that women should get mammograms. "Much of the debate over whether or not women in their 40s should have mammograms centers around medical studies and the statistics they generate. One simple fact in the debate is that studies have shown that the survival rate for women in their 40s is not effected [sic] by receiving routine mammograms. That said, we can begin to look at the numerous other factors that come into play in the debate, namely the emotionally loaded term "survival rate." Says Russell Harris of the University of North Carolina, even "if you screen 1,000 women in their 40s for 10 years, you prolong one or two lives." For many, the prolongment of one or two lives is one very essential outcome of mammography and breast cancer screening." bookpage.com