What if you are told to employ a screening tool to examine yourself and the reality is that the breast cancer self-exams are more harmful than advantageous?
To shock you out of you wits, researchers from an international organization, the Cochrane Collaboration, have found out in a medical research that screening tool like self examination is not a reliable or even, a safe method to be used by women. Contrary to what is thought and believed, the self screening tool can put your life in jeopardy.
Researchers observed and assessed two population-related studies which took into consideration 388,535 women from Russia and China and divided them into two groups arbitrarily.
One group (first group) was given a demonstration of how to use the self-examination test and was told to conduct the test on a regular basis. The second group was instructed not to indulge at all in any such activity.
The results were shocking! Out of 587 women who lost their life due to breast cancer, 295 were from second group and 292 were from first group who regularly did self-screening test. The infinitesimal difference indicated that conducting screening tests did no benefit to those who suffered from breast cancer.
In fact women from first group had to undertake 3,406 biopsies, almost twice the number of times women from second group underwent biopsies.
The study published in the Journal of Public Health Medicine in 1988 suggests that 61% of women who go through surgical biopsies, post the treatment , even when months pass by, experience anxiety and psychological distress, including trouble sleeping, alteration in appetite and depression.
Dr. Carolyn Runowicz, director of the Carole and Ray Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Connecticut Health Center, points out that "common sense suggests that it is not possible for us to be 'breast aware' without examining [the breasts]."
There are studies which show that many women are able to find out cancerous breast lumps in there body. But as of now the researcher have not been able to find out how these women became aware about their own lumps.
Regarding this , Dr. Konrad Jamrozik, a professor of evidence-based health care at the University of Queensland in Australia remarks that, "Once a malignant lump is found, whether it was discovered as part of a regular breast self-exam or not does not really matter."
Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecological cancer for the American Cancer Society said, "Our recommendation is that women who want to do a breast self-exam should go ahead and do it as long as they realize the limitations and that there may be extra biopsies." And those women who want to refrain from such self tests must not think blameworthy of themselves.
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