I’m sure they are. One of my colleagues has been loudly denouncing the new recommendations all week because her mother had a breast malignancy diagnosed at age 49 with a routine screening mammo that she believes would have been metastatic a year later.
She’d feel differently if her mother had been one of the people who reacted to anesthesia during an excisional biopsy and died. Or who had a serious bout of depression brought on by the test and killed herself. Or died from complications of treatment of a breast cancer that would have regressed spontaneously. Or even if she had been one of the (at least) dozens of people who had serious but nonfatal complications arising from the test.
I expect her to place a lot more value on her mother’s experience than anyone else’s, because that’s how it works. It’s also why we have to have ways to look at these things objectively. Practicing medicine based on what feels right is costly and can be deadly.
Blame the media, it seems like every single movie/story/whatever someone gets cancer, there is lots of pain and suffering, and great hallmark moment scenes with brave little girls quivering their lips and most of the time someone dies bravely and the family soldiers on past great piles of crap … I just had my third run with having a tumor removed, and the only drama was the hypertensive crisis thanks to extreme dehydration, migraine and stress. The only drama with the first one was whether or not mrAru’s boat would return from the ORSE in time or if they would have to ship him back up to hold my hand while I had surgery.
On the plus side, every single person in the medical staffs involved were great - absolutely nothing like those infernal Cancer Treatment Center commercials [though I did like the woman who said her CTC doc told her he didnt find an expired date on her foot … I like a doc with a sense of humor] Not that there are not difficult issues - we read about people here on the SD that have problems, but we also get people who post here that the doc found something, and they get their hand held until they get the results and it turns out to be benign, or they get hooked up with information to keep them from that sort of panic.