Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Most of the medical screenings that have been pressed on me by one health professional or another fail the evidence-based test. Mammograms, for example: The conventional wisdom, tirelessly repeated by the leading breast cancer advocacy group, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, was that early detection through annual mammography would significantly increase the five-year survival rate from breast cancer.4 But repeated, huge, often international studies showed no significant decline in breast cancer mortality that could be attributed to routine mammographic screening. True, any woman whose cancer had been detected through screening might claim to have been saved by the intervention, but the likelihood was that the spot in her mammogram would never have developed into full-blown cancer. What screening was finding, and doctors were treating, were often slow-growing or inactive tumor sites—or even noninvasive conditions like the wrongly named “ductal cancer in situ,” or DCIS. Treating pre-cancers and non-cancers may seem like a commendable excess of caution, except that the treatments themselves—surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation—entail their own considerable risks. Disturbingly enough, breast biopsies are themselves a risk factor for cancer and can “seed” adjacent tissue with cancer cells.