Reply #13: That's the mantra. They say it over and over again.

[JenniferJuniper]

But reality may be quite different as statistics seem to indicate otherwise for some types cancers, notably prostate and breast.

It's beginning to look like it isn't the size of the tumor that matters but the nature of the particular cancer cells in the patient's body. So a tiny tumor could be really bad and kill a patient regardless of how quickly it is caught while much larger one could be relatively harmless.

Have breast cancer rates really gone through the roof in the years since mammography became standard practice or are mammograms just detecting many more pre-invasive ductal carcinoma-in-situ that otherwise would never be diagnosed and may not require aggressive treatment? Our current diagnostic tools cannot distinguish.

From a UK study reported in the Sunday Times: "Whilst mammography detects some potentially deadly cancers, it also picks up many times more cancers that might never become symptomatic during the patients’ lifetime, or that could be treated just as easily if detection were left until the woman could feel the lump herself. Thus, for every woman saved by early diagnosis, many others receive painful and potentially dangerous treatments to destroy tumours that pose little or no threat – tumours that they might die with, not of.”

Despite the mantra, mammograms are an old-fashioned tool of somewhat limited value. We should be demanding much more.