Comments on: Taking A Stand Against the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force’s “New Breast Cancer Guidelines”

By: Danna Ntaka

Danna Ntaka — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:04:38 +0000

I am not familiar with the level of expertise and efficiency of the USPSTF, am not willing to call them losers before thoroughly investigating the credentials of their researchers. However, as medical professionals, we need to work together on solutions and refrain from polarizing each other on the issues and name calling.

Newer techniques and updated technology need to be developed to eliminate false positives. As a women’s advocate and doctoral level researcher, I do not recommend adopting a policy that will cause women to eliminate screenings. Sometimes lower income or less educated women may misinterpret the findings and receive no breast care. Many uninformed women do not perform monthly self exams, as is suggested.

On a lighter note, I am astonished by many of the presentations that are given at medical symposiums. I speak to audiences several times each week, and there is an art to public speaking. Some of the most brilliant medical specialists have not mastered public speaking. I agree that we need to improve the format of our conventions, such as hiring professional speech writers and publicists to assist with proper presentation of the scientific data. Being a medical scientist does not make you an effective presenter. Some speakers rival Ambien for putting audiences to sleep.

By: James Ehrlich MD

James Ehrlich MD — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:25:18 +0000

I happen to agree with Judith Wagner about the fact that mammography is associated with radiation and often leads to false positives. In my opinion, women at younger ages (with denser breasts) should consider a multimodal approach to breast cancer detection using techniques like the sentinel breast scan (www.infraredsciences.com) to determine whether they can get away with very infrequent mammograms.

Although there are indeed studies of poor quality, the USPTF outrageously declared in a statement on coronary calcium imaging that only one study was of sufficient quality and discounted extremely well respected NIH studies. In a letter from true expert cardiologists in the field (not these amateur family docs on USPSTF), there was a call for them to actually include experts in the fields they comment upon

By: Judith Wagner

Judith Wagner — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:23:39 +0000

USPSTF is getting a bad rap. They’re not a bunch of losers, just a bunch of experts on how to interpret the evidence. Much of the evidence presented at prof society meetings is of poor quality, and USPSTF discounts it. I wish some women would speak up who have had painful & disfiguring breast biopsies for the many false positives, not to mention the fact that such biopsies make future mammograms more difficult to interpret. (And, radiation dose isn’t even on the table here, though the cumulative lifetime dose of radiation will, over all those women, cause a few cancers themselves.)

By: James Ehrlich MD

James Ehrlich MD — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:20:08 +0000

As a physician who has reviewed previous irresponsible recommendations in other fields (like cardiology) from the USPSTF, I can absolutely prove they are as intellectually dishonest an organization as it gets. They start out with an agenda (generally to ration healthcare) and then pretend they review the literature c…omprehensively. Instead, they only select those articles that support their position before they do the research. In a recent guideline article on the use of cardiac imaging, they ignored the results of highly respected huge studies and their conclusions were completely against the grain of the experts from the American Heart Assn and American College of Cardiology. These are loser family docs who never attend the specialty meetings (in women’s imaging, breast cancer task forces, etc) and almost always get it wrong.