Your post is amazing and is worthy of a copy, print, and distribution.......be calm....I am a warrior for the rights of humanity and it is not humility that is warranted.....this country is embarrassing and will be worse if women just lie down on this asinine study! Your dialogue in # 5 says it all......I am grateful that my cancer was caught early. I knew something was wrong 6 months before my mammogram. I was complaining about a sore spot near my nipple, feeling rundown, major lower back pain, and swelling behind my right knee and my doctor says...."you play soccer and are run down and besides you just had a mammogram 6 months ago, it is probably a jammed milk duct and  breast cancer is an older woman disease." Well well....six months later, I am diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma....grade 3...her 2 +....ummm and wait a minute, the good news is haha that it is estrogen charged, so it will respond favorably to treatment. Funny, I do not recall the congratulation card from my primary care doctor on my "good cancer" diagnose.

Thanks for your article.  It makes some good points.  I had been thinking, too, about that old addage. 

I have always been told mammograms are low-dose.  I worried, too, about getting them, and what they might do TO me, as well as FOR me.  But, "Oh no," they say, "low-dose, low dose.  Like talking on a cell phone, or taking a plane trip, or watching TV."  Well, I don't see any new studies that are citing these as possible causes of cancer (thought they probably figure in), and "Hey we need to cut down exposure, so lets stop letting people younger than 50 have a cell phone, or fly on a plane, or watch TV."

How worried are they about radiation once you are diagnosed with breast cancer?  Goodness, I was thrown into an OCEAN of the stuff, for a year after diagnosis.  Mammograms galore, CTs, X-rays, and nuclear tests that used radioactive dyes, not to mention radiation therapy.  If ANYONE should be protected against radiation, shouldn't it be the one who already HAS cancer, and a compromised immune system from treatment, to boot?  But no one is saying, "Let's see what we can do about reducing exposure for the breast cancer patient."

Now they are saying the risks of mammograms outweigh the benefits, since the fast growing cancers of younger women aren't always caught due to dense breasts, and are hard to cure whenever they are found, so why put all young women at risk from the radiation of a mammogram, that MAY cause a few cancers, bc of the few that can't really be helped anyway.  I don't know.  It just sounds like giving up on the young women, for one thing.  Why not wait until we have a suitable substitute screening method for younger women before we start throwing them to the dogs? 

Besides this, women younger than 50 do NOT all have hard to beat cancers.  Mine was found at stage IIIC, IDC, surrounded by DCIS, HR/PR+, HER2- and 10 + nodes.  If found earlier than 46, like at 40, for example, it would have been such an easier time for me.  It is only hard to cure BECAUSE I was putting off mammograms (worried about that radiation).  It was found so late, now I live with the knowledge of a high chance of recurrence or progression, which I would not have had to live with if it was caught earlier.  There are many more ladies like me.  There are more in my support group that were diagnosed in their 40s than any other age.  I don't know all their profiles.  But, goodness, if women in their 40s are no longer getting screened, or wating until they find a lump, like I did...I shudder to think. 

I have heard (Dr. Love has said) that the guidelines did not say NOT to do self-exams, but that doctors need not teach them, as any way a woman examines herself seems to be fine.  If she finds her own lump, then it can be dealt with.  But when you find a lump that turns out to be cancer, that pretty much means it is already invasive, and your life is about to be changed a lot more dramatically than if it were found earlier. 

It's both expensive, and harsh, to take treatment for a later stage.  It damages one's body and brain so that women I talk to everywhere (as well as myself) are never the same.  Many can't return to work, or work at their previous level of functioning.  It is emotionally devatstating--much worse than a false negative scare.  So I just don't get all this. 

You really do have to wonder who, and what, was driving this study.  Follow it back to its source(s) and, if I were a betting person, I would wager money is somehow at the root of it.  Either that or it ties in somehow with political happenings just now.  Or both.