Breast Cancers that Disappear Without Treatment?

Well, I have to add that a digital mammo found my tiny DCIS before it even became large enough to need rads. I am grateful for my mammo. I read that thermographs do not see DCIS, but I may be wrong. I know that not all DCIS progresses to IDC, but all of IDC starts as DCIS. Mammos that are read properly are very good at finding DCIS.

Umm  Barbe1958 on demand doesn't exists anywhere.. Once you have had cancer you are considered high risk and either Canada or US will allow an MRI.. the fact that you live in Barrie is more to the point that you have to wait so long for the breast MRI.. and here in the states there are problems too with MRI's not being as available as say in large city's.  I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't wait so long if you were living in Toronto..  And you just made my point, if more women were insisting that the newest technology be used we would have more MRI centers and, eventually they would/will surpass mammos.

YOU might not mind hearing the "bitch" word but other's do - I do -  and strong women have worked too hard to have to hear this from another women and then have it endorsed with the phrase that only a "bitch" might have a problem hearing the word!!!  Don't you get this at all ??  You are dismissing a great deal of women and that happens too often in this wordl without your helping it!  It's (bitch) is only a "good word" if you are describing a female dog!

 American Cancer Society ties to Mammo

Mammography
The ACS has close connections to the mammography industry. Five radiologists have served as ACS presidents, and in its every move, the ACS reflects the interests of the major manufacturers of mammogram machines and films, including Siemens, DuPont, General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and Piker. In fact, if every woman were to follow ACS and NCI mammography guidelines, the annual revenue to health care facilities would be a staggering $5 billion, including at least $2.5 billion for premenopausal women. Promotions of the ACS continue to
lure women of all ages into mammography centers, leading them to believe that mammography is their best hope against breast cancer. A leading Massachusetts newspaper featured a photograph of two women in their twenties in an ACS advertisement that promised early detection results in a cure "nearly 100 percent of the time." An ACS communications director, questioned by journalist Kate Dempsey, responded in an article published by the Massachusetts Women's
Community's journal Cancer: "The ad isn't based on a study. When you make an advertisement, you just say what you can to get women in the door. You exaggerate a point. . . . Mammography today is a lucrative [and] highly competitive business."

In addition, the mammography industry conducts research for the ACS and its grantees, serves on advisory boards, and donates considerable funds. DuPont also is a substantial backer of the ACS Breast Health Awareness Program; sponsors television shows and other media productions touting mammography; produces advertising, promotional, and information literature for hospitals, clinics, medical organizations, and doctors; produces educational films; and, of course, lobbies Congress for legislation promoting availability of mammography services. In virtually all of its important actions, the ACS has been strongly linked with the mammography industry, ignoring the development of viable alternatives to mammography.

The ACS exposes premenopausal women to radiation hazards from mammography with little or no evidence of benefits. The ACS also fails to tell them that their breasts will change so much over time that the "baseline" images have little or no future relevance. This is truly an American Cancer Society crusade. But against whom, or rather, for whom?

Can I just write bitching? There I feel better

Flalady

Yasmin I share your sentiments about ER+ cancers and chemo. I am amazed by how much faith people put in chemotherapy and in diagnostic tools like mammograms. It is almost as if they don't want to hear the truth. This has nothing to do with "alternative" treatments - it is cold hard scientific fact  .... ER+ tumours do not respond as well to chemo as ER-. And there are growing numbers of oncologists who suspect that they may not respond at all and that all of the reduction in risk recurrence is coming from endocrine therapy. In which case thousands of women worldwide are undergoing excruciating treatment for no reason and compromising their general health - and in the case of countries without health care, like the USA, are paying through the nose for it too.

Mammograms are just one diagnostic tool in a whole armoury of gadgets. At British breast clinics several methods are used and no doctor would ever depend solely on a mammogram these days as their weaknesses are well documented. They are notoriously hopeless in diagnosing lobular or inflammatory and with young women whose breasts are more dense they are next to useless.

There are lots of links for info on thermography. Here is a really good one:

http://www.breastthermography.org/index.htm

They have a great explanation and show the difference in cancerous and healthy breasts. Therms can actually detect suspicious areas long before mammos due. One of the critcisms is that they may produce false positives. That is why it is always important to follow up with US or MRI.

If you live near any major US city you can probably find docs who do thermography. It is common for chiropractors to train in reading them, since thermography has been considered a valuable tool for determining joint and muscle injuries for decades. Just make sure you find someone who has read a lot of them. Just like those who read mammos, they are only as accurate as the tech who reads them.

My cost about $150 and is sometimes covered by insurance. I had to pay for it myself, but I would have paid more for a mammo, because I have a huge deductable. Just like mammos, it is good to have a baseline done so that comparisons can be made on those thereafter.

Interesting thread. My only problem with the word "bitching" is that, to me, it connotes a sort of non-productive noise--but that's just me.  Hell, sometimes I wish I could be a giant BITCH sometimes to get things done.

Anyway, this is slightly off topic, but it's been mentioned here a couple of times and I'm curious:  I remember the study that came out within the last couple of years that suggested chemo is not effective for ER+ cancers. Now, here's the deal:  I'm ER+ and metastatic. I did hormonals for 2 1/2 years that mostly just kept me stable (two lesions did seem to resolve but numerous others just kind of held at the size they were when discovered). I was metastatic at dx, so no prior chemo for me. I'm doing chemo now. Within 3 weeks of starting chemo, much of the pain caused by my cancer left and within a couple of cycles I noticed a reduction in size of some tumor areas I have that could be palpated. If chemo is not effective for ER+ cancers, how is this possible? Or, do the studies just suggest no overall survival benefit? Since there is a belief that tumors may not be homogenous, is the benefit I appear to be getting from chemo just benefit to the ER- cells I may have floating around in there?

Maybe it's just a question of immediate versus long-term benefit. That would make sense in the metastatic setting.

Can anybody here explain it in "chemo for dummies" terms?  I'm feeling really confused by this one!

((((HUGS)))
Diane

just to throw another thing out there:  I had a large (5-6cm) lump that was VISIBLE through my clothing but neither it nor the multifocal DCIS and 2 other lumps showed up on Mammo. I was "too young" for routine mammos (supposed to start at 40 here)

I think that, as bc seems to be hitting younger and younger women in larger numbers, screening mammos exclusively as early detection tools are inadequate.  Still, they are a quick and inexpensive method that allow for greater accessability for many. 

Just to weigh in.... mammograms are effective for some... granted not all. It definitely caught my BC at an early stage since I did not feel a lump EVER even after diagnosis.  So is it going to hurt to have one?  I don't know.  What percentage of people had their BC caught by mammogram?  I don't know but even it it was a few percent is that not better than zero?

And granted, finding cancer early doesn't guarantee a cure especially if the tumor is aggressive.  But would it be better to go back to the olden days when people couldn't be treated at all because they didn't have the diagnostic tools to see what was wrong and they didn't have the current treatment options?

I work in the medical profession and there are problems with all diagnostic tools.  A person may have unrelenting back pain and go in for an MRI that shows a disc problem.  The neurosurgeon goes in to fix the disc and the pain continues.  Why? Because the disc wasn't really the problem it was just a non-symptomatic anomoly that was found on a diagnostic image.  But should we stop doing MRIs on people with unrelenting back pain? 

My belief is that even 1 person in 100 benefits from an early diagnosis by a screening mammogram, there is really no harm in doing it until another cost-effective, low radiation screening test is developed.

Badboob67(Diane) - my understanding over the poor efficacy of chemo when used with ER+ tumours is particularly in respect of it being used adjuvantly in early stage cancers. Because they cannot get a large scale study together (>1000 women) who are ER+ and who are prepared to have chemotherapy but NOT take hormone therapy it is impossible to precisely evaluate chemo's effectiveness when used adjuvantly. So when it is dished out as standard treatment for all and sundry there are many many women gaining no benefit whatsoever and who are risking serious health problems (e.g. heart damage with FEC).

They know (and have known for a very long time) that ER- tumours respond better to chemotherapy than ER+ tumours. They know this from women like yourself with mets or when chemo has been used pre-adjuvantly to shrink lumps prior to surgery. However I have also known of ER+ women who have had great success with chemo - particularly with the Taxanes.

On another topic I am surprised by how many people invest in the OncotypeDX test. The whole area of genomic assay is still very much in development and OncotypeDX in particular does not factor in the crucial advances made with aromatase inhibitors - it only runs comparisons with Tamoxifen. It has been rejected (in its current guise) by almost every country except the US and yet I see it mentioned over and over again on this boards. Someone somewhere is getting very rich.

Until they get proper lifetime stats in nobody really knows if the Oncotype test is an accurate tool as a prognostic indicator. The prospect of truly personalised treatment is a wonderful thing - but I don't think we are anywhere near it yet.

Barbe1958:  You are very condesending.. How do you know I am NOT lobbying and like the rest of the world WORKING!    We can and have changed the system, it is comments like this that make people think that their input and action is worthless.. I'm not going to go into this any more with you here (no need to highjack the post) so if you have any more personal comments to make to me please do so in private e-mail.

WEll LB13 I'll say it again I was dx with ONLY MRI - I had, within one weeks time, a mammo, a digital mammo a sonagram all negative until the MRI was done.  That is why I have been reviewing the data on mammo's etc.. I was concerned AFTER I was dx with ONLY the MRI everything else was clean! 

There are a great deal of women on the DCIS board that have been dx with an MRI.  The stats are in question all the time and the only reason that the floating stuff is important is that there aren't as many MRI radiologist and techs on MRI's  and so they are not fully trained YET..

MRI have been around for a very long time and although there aren't many stats on breast MRI's there are hundreds on MRI's in general without negative results.. That being said I would say that it is a concern - there should be studies and there will be studies as time goes on, but right now the medical field doesn't find a problem with general MRI's.  I will conceed your point when a problem is found. It is however a valuable point and a question we should have about any of our testing.. Does it do harm..