Women Continue To Make Fear-Based Decisions About Breast Cancer

"Remove both of them" -- double mastectomy. That is the demand made by more and more women who are diagnosed with breast cancer. In a 5-year period, the percentage of women electing to have both breasts surgically removed has risen from just under 2% to almost 5%.

A survey of a small portion of the women diagnosed with breast cancer, published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, online, if extrapolated to all 200,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer annually, would mean 8000 to 10,000 patients a year elect to undergo this procedure.

“The comment patients make is, ‘I just want to be done with it,’” said one doctor. “They never want to have another mammogram again; they never want to have another biopsy again.”

For the vast majority of our patients, this does not impact the chances of dying of breast cancer, and that’s the key thing here,” said Dr. Julie R. Gralow, the chairwoman of the communications committee of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and an associate professor of medical oncology at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The question is, why do doctors consent to the patient's wishes when there is no evidence of benefit? These aren't requests from dying women who have no other hope. There is only risk for harm and no benefit in this circumstance. When it comes to cancer, irrational decisions are made. There is no such thing as "got it all" in cancer treatment. Surgery, in fact, increases the chances that tumor cells will escape into the blood circulation and cause tumors elsewhere. A 1-millimeter ball of remaining tumor cells represents 10 million cancer cells. -Copyright 2007 Bill Sardi Knowledge of Health, Inc.