The Conspiracy of Hope

Renée Pellerin is a former CBC health journalist and the author ofConspiracy of Hope, The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, published by Goose Lane Editions. Below is an except from her article in the Globe and Mail responding to the new guidelines publishedby the CanadianTask Force on Preventative Health Care forbreast cancer screening. “Every woman…

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Doctors are surprisingly bad at understanding the science of probability

Dr Daniel Morgan, (an associate professor of epidemiology, public health and infectious diseases at the University of Maryland School of Medicine) has found in his research that many physicians misunderstand test results or think tests are more accurate than they are. Doctors especially fail to grasp how false positives work, which means they make crucial…

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The Difficulties of Diagnosing Inflammatory Breast Cancer

Dr Kathy D. Miller of Indianan University explains in this video the difficulty in diagnosing inflammatory breast cancer. Dr. Miller describes a common scenario among doctors diagnosing inflammatory breast cancer. Currently there is no clear answer, as the quote below describes a patients symptoms and the varying opinions of the team of doctors. “The patient…

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40 over 40

40% of Women Over 40 Have Dense Breasts. Why does this matter? Fact the denser the breast the higher the risk of getting breast cancer. Fact having dense breasts is a greater risk factor than having a family history of breast cancer. Fact mammograms miss about 50% of breast cancer in the densest breasts. The…

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Young Women with Breast Cancer – The Forgotten Generation?

Are young women a forgotten generation when it comes to breast cancer? Thousands of young women are diagnosed every year. They often face the most aggressive cancers. One young Canadian women, profiled in Rachel Ray Everyday shared her story. Judit Saunders was 26 years old andworking as a registered nurse at a major children’s hospital…

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Many Women Could Be Spared Chemotherapy

  The largest precision medicine study ever done was presented at a plenary session at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Researchers looked at more than 10,000 women aged 18-75. Researchers were looking at whether the standard of care of chemotherapy and endocrine therapy benefit all women with the…

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The Sharks and The Minnows

The wide net of cancer detection is picking up the Sharks – the aggressive tumors – and the Minnows- the non-aggressive tumors. “We are not seeing enough of the really lethal cancers, and we’re finding too many of the slow moving ones that probably don’t need to be found” says Laura Esserman, a breast cancer…

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