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Mammograms Don’t Save Lives? Dr. Jennifer Simmons Explains... | DSH #1856
00:23:05
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- [00:00]
A
At autopsy studies, we know that all comers, women not that died of breast cancer, but died of car accidents, overdoses. And if you were to look at their breasts under the microscope, one in five women have microscopic evidence of breast cancer. But one in five women do not have breast cancer. Nothing like that. There are a lot of women that would die with breast cancer rather than of breast cancer. And by using mammogram to screen everyone, you're picking up all of these women who would never have developed clinical disease, but then once you treat them for breast cancer, forever change them, and not in a good way.
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B
Okay, guys, Dr. Jennifer Simmons here. Today, we're going to talk breast cancer and breast cancer prevention and all that good stuff.
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A
Yeah. Thanks for all things breast health.
- [00:49]
B
Thanks for doing this. Thanks for.
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A
My pleasure. So happy to be here.
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B
Yeah. I mean, it's a major issue right now, right?
- [00:54]
A
It is. It is. I think that now more than ever, as we're having this resurgence about hormones and perimenopausal therapy and postmenopausal therapy. And the bottom line is the one thing that everyone, from the very young to the very old and everyone in between is worried about is breast cancer. And how do we find out about breast cancer? But through breast cancer screening. And our screening program is broken and has been broken for decades because it's totally focused around an archaic technology that, quite frankly, doesn't work, because what it does is it screens the entire population the same exact way, whether you're low risk, high risk, or anywhere in between. And there has never been a study that showed that screening with mammogram decreases mortality. So there's no survival benefit at all to screening with mammogram. And in fact, what ends up happening when you screen with mammogram is, is that you lead to over diagnosis, over treatment. And there are significant harms to the population in doing that. And the number one thing that we could do to decrease breast cancer incidence is to stop screening with mammogram tomorrow. And that makes people feel really uncomfortable because they're worried that you're gonna miss a diagnosis, that women will die. And it's absolutely, positively untrue. Like, we have huge studies of women, 600,000 women in the Swedish trials where 300,000 underwent mammographic screening, 300,000 went without. And the same number of women die in each group, really. So there is no increase in survival from screening with mammogram. And the only difference between the two groups is that if you screen with mammogram, you're going to diagnose 20 to 30% more cancers. So it just brings about over diagnosis. So these are women that would have died with breast cancer rather than of breast cancer. And when we look at autopsy studies, we know that all comers, women not that died of breast cancer, but died of car accidents, overdoses, you know, these kinds of things. And if you were to look at their breasts under the microscope, one in five women have microscopic evidence of breast cancer, but one in five women do not have breast cancer. Nothing like that. So there are a lot of women that would die with breast cancer rather than of breast cancer. And by using mammogram to screen everyone, you're picking up all of these women who would never have developed clinical disease. But then once you treat them for breast cancer, you forever change them and not in a good way. Yeah, right. The psychological toll. I just heard a horrible statistic which is that it's. The bankruptcy rate for women after breast cancer is enormous. Like one in two women will really, really suffer from a financial perspective just secondary to having been treated for breast cancer, I'd imagine.
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B
It's not cheap to treat.
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A
No, it's not.
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B
It's, it's like insurance won't cover it most of the time. Right.
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A
They don't cover everything. They don't cover near everything. And our entire system is geared towards the providers using the most expensive ways to treat. And it's the patient that pays the price because the patient is being stuck with that delta between what insurance is paying for and what the cost of the procedure was. And they get very little vote. It's not like they're having a conversation with their medical oncologist. That sounds like, well, well, I can give you this drug which is this amount of money or this drug with this amount of money, the outcome's the same.
- [04:53]
B
Yeah. They don't tell you the cost of it.
- [04:55]
A
They don't, they don't. And you're never allowed to participate in that part of the conversation. And then you're just stuck holding the bill at the end. And in many cases, especially in the case of metastatic disease, the drugs that are being given really do not extend life. So. And at $100,000 a dose, like what are we doing?
- [05:22]
C
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B
$100,000.
- [06:20]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
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B
Unreal.
- [06:22]
A
Yeah, unreal, unreal. To extend life by weeks, three weeks, four weeks. I mean, it just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. And I'm not judging or here to say, you know, how valuable is a week of your life? Of course, but it's not like a quality week of your life, right? It's horrible. You're in pain, you're suffering. These drugs have horrible, horrible side effects. So our system is so very broken and so centered around illness. And the only way that doctors are rewarded, the only way hospitals are rewarded is if you're sick. And until we start to value health, until we change our system to be centered and geared around health, and it's going to remain broken 100%.
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B
Is there an alternative to the mammogram? Let's say someone watching this wants to get a scan or a test.
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A
Absolutely. So the way that I screen for breast cancer is that first of all, I encourage every woman to do self breast examination. No one is ever going to know you better than you know yourself. And the truth, the truth is that most young women are finding their own cancer. It's not being found on screening. The second thing is there's something called the ARIA tears test. And this is an at home kit that you can use to screen for breast cancer. It is very inexpensive. It has a 93% sensitivity for breast cancer. So better than any other imaging except for MRI. And MRI has a tremendous amount of false positives. And in five minutes, 100% safely, you put a little piece of litmus paper in your eye, take, take it out, send it to the company and in a week and a half you get a result that is either normal and then you're done screening for breast cancer. If you have a normal examination and a normal ARIA test, You don't have breast cancer, and you don't have nothing to worry about. And if you get a clinically significant result, this means that you have the inflammatory precursors to breast cancer, and you go get imaging. And if you don't have clinical evidence of breast cancer, you know that you're still at increased risk because this result is positive. And what you do have is the opportunity to prevent a breast cancer diagnosis. So not only is this a screening test, but it's also preventative. So this is groundbreaking. This is going to forever change how we screen for breast cancer.
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B
That's amazing.
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A
And give women an opportunity that they never had before. Because there's nothing preventative about a mammogram. There's nothing preventative about an ultrasound or an mri. But with this test, because it's not measuring for breast cancer, it's measuring for the inflammatory precursors. And we can mitigate inflammation. And when we do that, we can actually prevent a diagnosis.
- [09:05]
B
Incredible. Yeah. This resonates with me because my own mother, she. They said she had stage zero breast cancer. She removed both of her breasts because of that. And it makes me wonder, like, I
- [09:16]
A
know when you told me that. It's just. It's so disconcerting. And again, this is another example of how broken our system is, because we take a condition that is not cancer and we treat it like cancer. And these women are forever changed. Like you. No matter how much preparation you do, no matter if you do a wonderful reconstruction, you can never prepare a woman for the devastation of breast removal. You just can't. And there will never come a day for the rest of her life when she won't remember that she had breast cancer. And I understand that it's necessary sometimes, right? Sometimes in order to heal that person, in order to get that person healthy, you do need to do a mastectomy. But in the case of DCIS, Dr. Carcinoma in Situ. This is not cancer. No one ever dies of this form of disease. Wow. And we know that 80% of these will never progress to become invasive cancer.
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B
When the doctor pushed her to get her breasts removed.
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A
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- [10:30]
D
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- [10:38]
C
That's why I've been going with quints.
- [10:40]
D
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- [11:27]
A
Wow. Yeah. That's awful.
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B
She w. She watches every episode. So I'm sorry, mom that happened to you. That's crazy.
- [11:33]
A
I'm. I'm sorry that happened to you. 80%. And there are. There are. Things are changing. And there are physicians that are now at least considering observation with these women. And I don't want to say waiting for progression, but not doing things like mastectomy in women unless there is an indication that this is a progressing condition. So things are changing, but not quickly enough. And in the meantime, there's all of these casualties along the road because it is devastating. And these women do believe that they had breast cancer. They're told that this is breast cancer, and they're treated like it's breast cancer. And the treatments are not without their devastating side effects. Losing your breast is a devastating side effect. Some of the medicines that are used increase cardiovascular disease, increase neurodegenerative disease, increase osteoporosis, and, you know, lest we forget, the same number of women die of a complication of a fracture every year as die of breast cancer. So if you're taking a condition that is not life threatening, treating it, and then giving someone a condition that is life threatening, what are we doing?
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B
Yeah.
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A
How have we helped that woman? We haven't.
- [13:09]
B
So are the numbers actually on the rise then for breast cancer, people actually getting it?
- [13:13]
A
Well, then the absolute numbers are on the rise, but that's just because we're sampling more people. So the harder you look for this disease, the more you're gonna find. But the same number of people are dying of breast cancer every year, and that has been true for 20 years. So that number hasn't changed.
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B
That's interesting.
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A
So the only thing that we're doing is increasing that denominator to make our numbers look better, to make us feel better about ourselves. But are we saving lives? No, we're just diagnosing more women with cancer. We are treating more women. We're helping the system, but we are not helping the patients.
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B
That is interesting, right?
- [14:00]
A
Yeah, it's. It's actually awful.
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B
That's fishy to me.
- [14:04]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And there was. There was just a study. The wisdom study was released last week. It was presented at the San Antonio conference. And what it looked at is either just using annual mammogram to screen or risk stratifying people. And the low risk group doesn't get screened at all until they're 50. And then at 50, they get screened every other year. The average risk group gets screened every year, and the high risk group gets screened every six months with alternating mammogram and mri. And the interesting thing that came out of this is that in the stratified group, you would expect them to, because they had less mammograms, to have less biopsies. And what they had is more biopsies. So the same exact number of cancers get diagnosed in both groups, but with less mammograms. They did more biopsies. And the reason they did more biopsies is because they did more MRIs, and the MRIs found more things, meaningless things. And so women ended up having more biopsies as a result. And this just goes to show you that the. The more you look for, the more you're going to find. But there's no benefit to the women. There's no benefit in looking harder. There's no benefit to diagnosing more cancers that would have never progressed.
- [15:36]
B
That's true.
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A
That would have never become clinical disease. So we're just creating this whole group of women that would have died with breast cancer, but not of breast cancer. And now we just make them live longer with the knowledge that they had the disease and with the ramifications of treatment.
- [15:57]
B
So it might be doing more harm than good, because we are doing more harm than good. You're also making these women super stressed and paranoid.
- [16:02]
A
That's exactly right. We are actually decreasing both the quality and the duration of their life in diagnosing them with breast cancer unnecessarily and treating them unnecessarily for breast cancer. So it's having devastating effects, and it's not a small number. So we know from the Swedish trials, we know from the Canadian breast cancer screening study that that number of over diagnosis is somewhere between 20 to 30%. Geez, so many people. We have 4 million women in this country living with a breast cancer diagnosis. If we're talking about 20%, it's almost a million. Yes, that's right. If we're talking about, you know, 20 to 30%. We're talking about a million women who were diagnosed and treated for breast cancer unnecessarily. Like, what are we doing?
- [17:01]
B
That's insane.
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A
Insane.
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B
Each one probably spent an average of six figures at least on the chemo, on the surgeries, at least on this, whatever they're giving them for.
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A
Yep, yep.
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B
The drugs, wow, what an industry for them.
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A
And all the side effects. And this leads us to, like, what's happening with these ladies afterwards, because when you treat a woman for breast cancer, and most of the treatments for breast cancer virtually eliminate the, their circulating estrogens, Right? So we're thrusting all of these women into menopause and while the rest of the world is allowed to have the menopause conversation. Right. And they got rid of the black box warning. So it, the access to hormones is being opened up for everyone except for the high risk population. So if you have a BRCA mutation, if you have a strong family history or, God forbid, a history of breast cancer, no one will talk to you about hormones. And these women are suffering, and they're probably suffering worse than the women who are not treated for breast cancer. Because when you treat a woman for breast cancer, you accelerate cardiovascular disease, you accelerate neurodegenerative disease, you accelerate osteoporosis. They have bone aches and joint aches, they have weight gain, they have a loss of confidence, a loss of sense of self. They have urinary continence problems, they have problems with chronic infections. They have no libido, their relationships are suffering. I mean, I mean, the divorce rate in the breast cancer population is really high because they basically take everything about a woman away from them, and then they give them no access to it on the other side. And it's all based on this belief that somehow giving these women hormone replacement after breast cancer increases recurrence. But we have 20 to 25 studies that, that say otherwise. There was only one trial, the habit trial, that showed an increase in breast cancer recurrence when you give hormone replacement after breast cancer. And that was based on the kind of hormone replacement that they gave them. So they gave them a synthetic progestogen in a high dose. And we know that that causes cancer in all the populations.
- [19:22]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [19:23]
A
So, you know, of course, if you give them the wrong thing, if you give them a cancer causing medication, they did exactly what you would expect. They do. They got cancer. But all the other studies, every other study showed no increase in breast cancer if you give them hormone replacement after breast cancer. So why aren't these people being included in the conversation because it's an inconvenient truth for the pharmaceutical companies.
- [19:51]
E
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- [20:52]
A
replacement, then they're not taking the antidepressants, then they're not taking the sleep medications, they're not taking the anxiolytics, they're not taking the weight loss medications and on and on and on. And so, you know, it's just the pharmaceutical companies are doing exactly what they have been doing for the last 20 years since the Women's Health Initiative. And that's exactly why the results of the Women's Health Initiative were what they were. Because if they can take away women's hormones, it opens up the door to 5, 10 pharmaceuticals. You know, it's a lot.
- [21:30]
B
Yeah. Thanks for speaking out on this. I know it hasn't been easy for you.
- [21:32]
A
Yeah.
- [21:33]
B
So I really appreciate that. How can people watching this take action, support you and keep up with you?
- [21:37]
A
Yeah. Well, just follow me on all social Dr. Jensimmons and my Jen has two NS. I wrote a book this year, a bestselling book called the Smart Woman's Guide to Breast Cancer. And this is really for anyone with breasts, but it's especially helpful to anyone who has gotten a breast cancer diagnosis because I pretty much give you a roadmap back to health and I help you to make an educated decision because most women are not getting that opportunity now. They're not given the information in order to make an educated decision. And so they're being railroaded into these treatments and therapies that have no long term benefit. And before they know it, they've been put on this, like, roller coaster of breast cancer treatment and they don't even know why they did it, they were so rushed into doing it. So the number one thing that I cover in my book, in the very first chapter of my book is take a breath, take a pause, get educated. Though it feels like an emergency, it is not. And here is everything that you need to make an educated decision and to restore your health and live the rest of your life in health with vitality.
- [22:53]
B
Beautiful. Check her out, guys. Check out the book.
- [22:55]
A
We'll link it below.
- [22:55]
B
Thanks for coming on. See ya.
- [22:57]
C
Thanks for watching all the way to the end, guys. It means a lot.
- [22:59]
E
Please click here if you want to watch the next episode and please subscribe to the show.
- [23:03]
C
It helps us get more guests and
- [23:04]
E
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