Quote Originally Posted by ny biker View Post
Yeah I understand the problem of false positives, but I'd really hate to be one of the 19% that could have been helped. That's a big number.
It's more like the 0.1% who could have been helped. Statistically, they have to irradiate 1,000 women and biopsy 100 before they get one who meets the doctors' definition of having been helped... which may be a considerably broader definition of "helped" than many patients may have.

This latest recommendation is the distillation of the doctors' grudging realization that they were harming way, way, way too many women in the name of helping some. And as others have pointed out, it merely brings the USA in line with the rest of the developed world (which, at least some of the rest of the developed world is now considering further narrowing the pool of women to whom they recommend irradiation).

I was thinking about this while doing yardwork this afternoon. Basically, for the individual, it's no different from a religion. There is no way that any individual can know whether she's been helped. It's sometimes, but not always, easier to know when a woman has been harmed.

Each of us has to believe what we need to believe to get through the day. Considering what's at stake, what we may have been through on this front, and the indoctrination we receive, just thinking about it, just looking in the mirror, putting on a bra or a HRM, can be extremely distressing. I'm pretty sure I have a mild case of PTSD from it, and I'm very sure that a lot of other women do.

IMO, the best we can do, just as we do with religion, is try to make choices and choose belief systems that don't hurt ourselves or other people, but at the same time try to avoid attacking other people's belief systems - even if they seem to us to be hurtful.