Should Preventive Mastectomy be among Allowed Treatments for Breast Cancer?
It is one thing to be told you have breast cancer and then to tap into whatever treatments you need to get better. But it's another thing to be a part of a growing number of women who, having learned about the bad news that they have cancer on one breast, choose to say that they would rather be alive than struggle with vanity. They choose to have both breasts removed, a double mastectomy, as the ultimate in treatments for breast cancer. Hospitals have found that over the last ten years, the number of women who have been willing to choose this kind of preventive removal, has doubled - to about 5% of all women who come to be diagnosed with breast cancer.
But this at least makes little sense: you've seen other women in your family develop breast cancer, and you have a case of it on one breast yourself. So you think that you might as well completely be done with it by removing both breasts. But how about women who don't have any cancer still choosing to live with no breasts? These are women who have a family history of breast cancer but have had nothing personally happen to them. Hospitals are finding that these women come in, and growing numbers, to get their preventive mastectomy done more than ever before. And this has everyone worried. Doctors don't believe that choosing this kind of voluntary amputation helps anyone live longer or be healthier.
Even among women who have cancer on one breast, only 5% get it because they have a genetic vulnerability to cancer. For the rest, with no genetic vulnerability, if they get it on one breast, they only stand a 20% chance that they could be unlucky enough to get it on the other breast too. And even if they do get it on the other breast, chances are excellent that they could detect it quickly and cure themselves. Before women try to beat the tiny odds that they could get incurable cancer a second time, they need to think about the certain physical damage that they will suffer when they choose preventive mastectomy, and the hidden consequences of complications - lifelong pain from nerve damage, infection, internal bleeding, and so on. Women have to be counseled into understanding that preventive mastectomies are not to be thought of as possible treatments for breast cancer prevention.
Cancer experts around the nation are beginning to look into offering better information and counseling to women, to help them leave such superstitious pseudoscientific convictions behind. Hospitals should also need to think of how to refuse women unnecessary treatments that they just cannot medically justify. There is the Hippocratic oath they need to think of, that they can never leave the patient worse off than before. About 10,000 women have done this over the last 15 years. This is no matter to take lightly anymore.
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