The hysterical response of women who took a statistic -- mammograms aren't surefire and the numbers are there to prove it -- and turned it into a government plot to kill them has taken over the news for the past several days.
Finally a woman comes along and tells it like it is with a sense of humor. New York Times columnist and woman, Gail Collins, takes on the Republican nutcases -- like Republican Congressman, David Camp -- who have been turning a statistical report into a condemnation of all government. She teases: "Whatever happens, we do not want the government conducting any studies on whether current health practices actually do any good. Let this continue and soon you will not be able to get your hands on a good leech when you need one."
Collins isn't just being funny. On the one hand, wrong diagnoses can land you in the soup; on the other, we're grownups and we can handle uncertainty and worry.
Every rational American wants qualified experts to keep re-examining current medical practices. The only thing that bothers me about the mammogram report is all the emphasis on the “anxiety” that might follow a false-positive. We live in a time when we are constantly being reminded that a fellow plane passenger might be trying to smuggle explosives in his sneakers. We can manage anxiety.I am going out on a limb to say that the real problem with a test that creates a lot of false-positive results is that it leads to a lot of other medical procedures, some involving hospitals. Unless you are genuinely sick, there is no more dangerous place to be hanging around than a hospital.
That's another serious statistic we have to do something about. More accurate, mammograms would be good; cleaning up hospitals would be even better. Collins continues.
I had breast cancer back in 2000, and I am trying to come up with a way that I can use that experience to shed some light on these new findings. I have never believed that everything happens for a reason. But I do feel very strongly that everything happens so that it can be turned into a column.
Whatever the moral would be, I don’t think it helps Representative Camp’s argument. I had mammograms every year like clockwork, and I had just gotten a clean bill of health from my latest one when I found a lump on my left breast while watching a rerun of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” multitasker that I am.
It turned out to be cancer, of a fairly low-grade variety. My oncologist felt strongly that it never would have developed if I hadn’t taken estrogen replacement therapy — another one of the medical marvels that has now been consigned to the Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time category.
So, in summary, the cutting-edge of medical thinking of the 1990s may have induced my cancer, and then the universally recommended testing protocol failed to detect it.
Nevertheless, everything seemed to work out fine, except that I had to have radiation while I was covering the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. In retrospect, it is possible that my attitude toward the Bush-Cheney ticket was colored by the fact that I was thinking a lot about mortal danger at the time.
This is true. If you lived through the Bush-Cheney regime, you can overcome anything -- from statistics to medical uncertainty to the scare tactics of the 24-hour news cycle.
