The Cry For Alternative Breast Cancer Screening

Although medicine continues to make tremendous leaps and bounds (just look at Charla Nash’s new face), it’s certainly not infallible.

Amy Colton is just one woman who has first hand experience of its imperfections. When she hit 40, she was diligent about getting regular mammograms. But seven years after her first one, she discovered the worst. She had later-stage breast cancer.

She says that mammograms were unable to detect breast cancer because she had dense breast tissue. To save other women from a similar fate, she took matters into her own hands. Now pending is Senate Bill 173, which will “require physicians to inform women if they have highly dense breast tissue” in California.

The bill is controversial, but not unprecedented. There are already notification laws in Connecticut as well as Texas. In Connecticut, insurers are even required to pay for alternate ultrasound screening.

For Colton, informing women could arm them with the tools to help save their lives, but the debate over density has opened up a bag of worms within the medical community. Some physicians are against the bill since there’s “not enough scientific evidence proving alternative screening measures find enough cancer to justify the expense.” They also worry that it will scare women and compel them to get an ultrasound despite what their mammogram says, resulting in “increased costs and pressures on a physician’s practice.”

But what is the cost of potentially saving a woman’s life? We must think a life is more significant than any pressures on the medical field. Physicians currently offering alternative screening believe that ultrasounds can (and do) fill the holes that mammograms leave behind.

Then again, there is something to frightening women into thinking that a mammogram (which “catches up to 95 percent of cancers”) isn’t enough – even if they’re not diagnosed with “dense tissue.”

Clearly, we need more conclusive evidence to determine how successful ultrasounds are in finding the cancer mammograms miss. But if one woman slipped through the cracks, surely it can happen to others.

We should use every resource we can in the fight against breast cancer.

Contact the author here: tinybart@morningquickie.com