Ductal carcinoma in situ or D.C.I.S. to those in the know, is a term you never want to hear mentioned in the same breath as your name. 50,000 women do in fact get to hear this term mentioned in conjunction with their name every year in this country. It's gotten worse ever since the health authorities began to tutor women to get regular mammograms. The misdiagnoses just keep pouring in. In case you thought that reading a mammogram was as simple for a pathologist as reading a blood test or a urine test, you'd be mistaken there. Telling the difference between a cancerous cell and a noncancerous cell is apparently high science that most pathologists are completely inept at. When a woman is told that she has ductal breast cancer, she never suspects any of this in the background.
Where is the government in all of this, you ask? The government is busy finding studies in ways to adopt in the setting of standards here. S o far, there are no tests are standards for pathologists to meet before they tell you that you have cancer. There is no board certification, there are no qualifications needed.
Yet indeed, ductal breast cancer is diagnosed at a breathtaking rate in the US, and these cases might as well be decided on a coin toss for all the accuracy they achieve. This is the finding of The United States Preventive Services Task Force. The College of American pathologists has said that it plans a voluntary certification system. Any pathologist in the country can take the certifying exam if they read at least 250 ductal breast cancer cases every year. But it's voluntary.
All of this trouble comes about because people are seriously concerned with identifying cancer at its earliest stages now. Before mammograms came along, no one ever knew there was anything wrong with women until an actual lump formed somewhere in the breast. Now that they are looking for breast cancer where no signs exist, the highest level of expertise is required to tell that cancer exists.
Even when things go very well in these cases, there is only a 30% chance that the ductal breast cancer will turn invasive and dangerous. The question we have to ask ourselves is, is that worth the kind of risk it is?
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LINKS
- Breast Cancer: Risks and Prevention, Diagnosis & Treatments
- Previvors: Facing the Breast Cancer Gene and Making Life-Changing Decisions
- Beyond Flowers: What to Say and Do When Someone You Know Has Breast Cancer [VHS]
- There's No Place Like Hope: A Guide to Beating Cancer in Mind-sized Bites
- Celebrating Julienne - a gay woman faces terminal breast cancer
- The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet: The Powerful Foods, Supplements, and Drugs That Can Save Your Life
- Breast Cancer; A Guide for Patients and their Families
- Yoga and Breast Cancer: A Journey to Health and Healing
- ABC News Nightline The
- Cancer Vixen: A True Story
