Filed by Michael Cross in Feature, Health, Local News, News, Politics.
December 7, 2009
 

Click here to download audio

The United States Prevention Service Task Force recently released new guidelines for breast cancer screenings which led to hearings last week on Capitol Hill.

The guidelines recommending no mammograms for women under 50 and not teaching women about self-examinations have some in Oklahoma a little upset.

The US Prevention Task Force predicts in 2009 nearly 200,000 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer and more than 40,000 will die.

Still, the agency is recommending women under 50 don’t need to get mammograms or perform self-examinations.

This comes as a shock to Doctor Rebecca Faulkner at the Northwest Family Medical Center.

Doctor Faulkner was diagnosed with breast cancer at 33 after she discovered a lump.

Because of early detection, the cancer measured just two centimeters and was removed quickly.

“For someone my age, in the mid-30s, that is a huge criteria for determining your survival,” says Faulkner. “Early detection really does lead to hugely increased survival rates.”

Doctor Faulkner says 10,000 women between 30 and 40 will get breast cancer.

She fears under the new guidelines women of that age will simply stop self-examinations.

“I think anytime you tell a woman ‘oh, you don’t need to do something to take care of your health.’ then there is a certain group of people that are going to take that to an extreme and say ‘well, I never need to see my doctor, and I never need to check myself, and I never need to get a mammogram’”.

The Integris Comprehensive Breast Center in Oklahoma City is keeping busy during the Christmas season sometimes answering questions about the new guidelines.

Medical Director Ann Archer says the newly released guidelines use literature and research from China and Russia, and she says it’s all about cost rather than health.

“Looked at by a group of government appointees, and they’ve come up with something that they think will be economically beneficial to the country and not necessarily beneficial to women in general.”

Doctor Archer says mammography has dropped the mortality rate by as much 30%.

And, Doctor Archer says there are no harms in getting mammograms.

“One of the things that reared its head in 2002 was that there was radiation dosage from mammography. The radiation dosage from mammography is comparable from flying from New York to LA. It is background radiation. Period.”

Both Doctors worry this will lead insurance agents to stop covering mammograms for women under 50.

But, State Representative Lewis Moore, District Manager for Colonial Life Insurance works with several insurance agents and says this won’t have an impact on coverage in Oklahoma.

“The mandate is age 40 that women get a mammogram check is a state legislated mandate.”

The Edmond Republican says for any change to happen in state law there would have to be an actuarial study and input from several cancer groups.

But, in the end he says this shouldn’t be about being frugal.

“We certainly are going to be more concerned about the health of our mothers, wives and daughters than we are going to be about what the cost is. There’s other places we can save money, and that’s not one of them.”

In fact, Representative Moore says more participation in mammograms would actually drive down the cost.

The US Task force members told lawmakers last week that early, frequent screenings often lead to false alarms and unneeded biopsies without substantially improving women’s odds of survival.

But, Doctor Faulkner who now gets to see her little boy grow up says she doesn’t believe negative results from early testing equal a waste of time and money.

“Boy I can tell you as a patient and a provider when I went through this process if they had called me and told me this was not a cancer. This was benign. I would not have still felt this was thrown away money.”

Prevention Task Force members did issue an apology last week acknowledging the way the recommendations were released wasn’t done smoothly.