OK ladies, listen closely as I am going to say something that might be a bit shocking to you – your yearly mammograms may be causing breast cancer! The radiation is dangerous and is quite possibly leading to the increase in breast cancer rates over the past 25 years! Are you shocked yet? Please read on.

I am not a medical doctor but I am a woman who is very interested in health, staying healthy, natural health, and the like. My husband’s new favorite website is naturalnews.com and he’s always sharing articles with me. This article on the dangers of mammograms was quite interesting, to say the least. The article is long but please read it all. There is so much good information in it.

The more radiation a woman receives during her lifetime (from any source) the more likely she will develop breast cancer. Some of the highlights of the article are:

• When mammography was in its infancy, the National Cancer Institute was warned that giving routine mammograms to women under 50 was close to unethical; the warning was ignored.
• The media and the government stayed quiet regarding the mounting evidence that mammograms caused cancer.
• In the 1990s facts were publicized about the dangers of mammograms and that women were not being told the truth, that the benefit is marginal and the harm is enormous.

The following paragraph in the article was very interesting:

As a result of all this pressure, Dr. Charles B. Simone, a former clinical associate in immunology and pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute finally came out and said “Mammograms increase the risk for developing breast cancer and raise the risk of spreading or metastasizing an existing growth. The annual mammographic screening of 10,000 women aged 50-70 will extend the lives of, at best, 26 of them; and the annual screening of 10,000 women in their 40s will extend the lives of only 12 women per year.”

And radiation isn’t the only danger with mammograms; the force of breast compression (about 50 pounds) has its own problems. Cancer cells must be treated gently so as not to spread them.

Cambell reports one animal study that found that the number of metastases will increase by 80 percent if the tumor is manipulated. A human study reported in the British Medical Journal found that death rates were increase by 29 percent in women whose breasts were squeezed during mammography. This is likely to be the result of the rupture of small blood vessels in or around small yet undetected breast cancers. This squeezing into the blood stream of malignant cells is why many women with breast cancer have cancer cells in their lymph nodes.

Another interesting point in the article is that mammograms are diverting women’s attention from addressing the real issues. Not much emphasis is placed on ways to avoid cancer or ways to lead a healthy lifestyle. I strongly believe that we need to be an active participant in our health and that starts with information; information about healthy lives, information about medical procedures and their risks vs. benefits.

Have you heard about breast thermography? I’m guessing you haven’t, as I hadn’t until just recently. It actually was approved by the FDA in 1982 for use as an adjunctive breast cancer screening procedure. Check out their website and you will probably be as amazed as I was.

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