I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but even I was suspicious of the advice that a friend got after visiting a gynecologist recently; the young, intelligent and female doctor told my friend that annual mammograms were not recommended women under the age of 50.

The advice was contrary to everything that I had heard about breast cancer prevention.

My friend--whose mother had lost a breast to breast cancer-- wasn’t too trusting of the advice either and told the doctor so, but when I researched the latest information on breast cancer on the Internet, I found several articles which reversed the American Cancer Society’s position on mammograms. SInce 2009, the government has been recommending that women get annual mammograms after the age of 50 and not after the age of 40.

The task force, which released the guidelines in 2009, also said that women should not do their own breast exams and that they might do more harm than good.

Excuse me, but wtf was the United States Preventive Services Task Force thinking?

Today, I just learned that the daughter of another good friend of mine had just been diagnosed with breast cancer; the doctors believe that the 46-year-old woman had had the breast cancer for two or three years without knowing. She found a lump in her breast herself just recently, went to the doctor, and was diagnosed with breast cancer the day before Christmas Eve.

If she had had a mammogram earlier, the mammogram would have caught the breast cancer at the onslaught and the now-invasive breast cancer would have been much easier to treat.

Some questions remain: was the panel biased in their recommendations? Were the panel members themselves unbiased? And how has the insurance industry responded to the “government’s recommendations”?

The actual website for the United States Preventive Services Task Force can be found here. If you follow the link, you can see that it does have the requisite .gov on the link. As CNN notes, the same group has also found that men don’t need prostrate cancer screening. (The justification for the panels’ decision are described in THIS CNN article; I would welcome the opinions of anyone more familiar with the disease.)

It doesn’t take a doctor to know that latent cancer cells can spread and it’s hard to understand the harm of early detection. Patients should have the right to make informed decisions about their health.