Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.
I have written on this topic before, but I believe it needs
to be revisited, especially here in October. As you are bombarded by pink this
and pink that the entire month of October every year, I think you should be
aware of the facts of the origins of “pink.”
These days, if you dare question any of this pink stuff, you
are treated like some kind of woman hating monster. Nothing could be further from
the truth. By exposing the myth and methods of pink, women’s lives and body
parts are likely to be saved, not cheapened for drug company profits.
As you know, it all starts here in October with “Breast
Cancer Awareness Month,” or as Dr. Douglass puts it “Bscam.” It was not started
by scientists hunting for the cause and cure of breast cancer. It was started
by a drug company.
In 1985, the Zeneca group, along with the American Cancer
Society (ACA), founded B-scam. The ACA is itself a public lobbying arm of the
drug and cancer industry. That leads to this question, if a drug company is
marketing “awareness”, what is the benefit to them? Awareness leads to
screenings, screenings leads to treatments, and treatment means drug company
profits. Please don’t get me wrong, drug company profits are fine with me if
what they offer is actually a benefit to patients. Make all the money you want
that way.
Mammograms are the first scam in this putrid cycle. They are
worthless for detection, diagnosis or prevention. There are many recent studies
that prove a mammogram does not save lives or prevent cancer. They do, however,
cause cancer with ionizing radiation at high levels. A Canadian Study just
showed that there is no difference in the death rate from breast cancer for
those with or without regular mammograms. If mammograms save lives, how can
this be?
The next scam is a biopsy of an “early detected” lump.
Studies show that when a lump is pierced by a needle, cancer cells enter the
blood stream. Clearly, the best way to prevent a possible tumor from spreading
cells is to leave it alone and intact.
One study shows that women who had a biopsy were 50% more
likely to develop cancer of the lymph modes under the arm pit in the future.
Another rite that is said to be ultra-important is
self-examination. They preach it from the start of puberty. The problem is that
breast lumps are normal. But since we have every woman scared to death of a
lump, more screenings and more unnecessary treatments are in order. Studies
show most lumps will never be a problem. Of course every woman who finds a lump
believes she has saved herself from death, but that is not the case. She most
likely just got unnecessary treatment.
Another recent study of some 266,000 women showed that the
death rate from breast cancer is the same for women who grope themselves every
month and those who don’t. So why concern yourself with a pointless ‘prevention
measure.”
One more thing I have read about lately is that of DNA
testing for breast cancer. DNA testing is the future of medicine, but not for
this reason. I’ve read where women are getting preventive mastectomies in
perfectly healthy breasts. While it is true you can’t get cancer in a body part
you don’t have, the studies do not back up this drastic measure.
A major new study of over 100,000 women with stage I or II
breast cancer has been completed. Some of these women had just the cancerous
breast taken off, others had both the cancerous and the normal breast removed.
Since this is supposed to save lives, you’d think the women with a double
mastectomy would have a higher survival rate. The real outcome was that there
was less than a one percent difference in survival rate.
In summary, the Bscam has the perfect confluence of events. More women get
screened and treated, falsely believing that treatment saved her life, then she
becomes an ambassador for the pink campaign of more awareness. This vicious
cycle must be stopped to save the maiming of women and the over treatment of
false breast cancer scares. The science proves my skepticism.