Most women skip mammograms, even when insurance will pay for them

Friday, December 10, 2010 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: mammograms, women, health news

(NaturalNews) Millions of U.S. women are apparently ignoring government recommendations and taking breast health into their own hands. A new report presented at the 33rd annual Cancer Therapy & Research Center / American Association for Cancer Research (CTRC-AACR) San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium has found that more than half of eligible women forgo breast cancer screenings, even when their insurance companies are willing to pay for them.

Milayna Subar, MD, vice president and national practice leader for oncology at Medco Health Solutions, and her colleagues discovered that even though there was much outcry over the recommended age to begin getting mammograms being raised from 40 to 50 years old, the majority of women in eligible age groups do not even get annual mammograms anyway.

Based on the research team's study of medical claims filed between January 2006 and December 2009, they found that less than half of women between the ages of 40 and 85 received a mammogram in an average year, even though all the women sampled had some kind of health insurance that covered the screening. And women over 65 were the least likely among all age groups to forgo the screening.

Though the team is not entirely sure why women are choosing not to get mammograms, perhaps one reason is the fact that mammograms do not actually work. Norwegian researchers recently found that the risk of dying from breast cancer is largely the same whether or not a woman gets mammograms (https://www.naturalnews.com/029839_mammograms...). And other studies have found that getting mammograms actually increases a woman's risk of developing cancer (https://www.naturalnews.com/029749_nuclear_im...).

Instead of getting routine doses of cancer-causing radiation, some women choose instead to take preventive measures to avoid getting it. These measures include maintaining high blood levels of vitamin D, eating lots of cruciferous vegetables, and avoiding toxic, cancer-causing chemicals (https://www.naturalnews.com/breast_cancer.htm...).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-...