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@ Dr. Bitcoin, MD
2025-05-03 18:10:26
You misunderstand the meta analysis and your actual question. Your question is equivalent to: “do mammograms decrease the rate of death by breast cancer?”
I’m gonna leave other subjects out of this for the moment because we will end up skimming the surface without being rigorous about what proof we actually seek.
That said, a better question than yours would be: “do mammograms increase lifespan?”
See the subtle difference? What good is it to save women from breast cancer if they become unbelievably more likely to die by lightning strike or alien abduction precisely because of mammograms? Competing causes of death matter and looking at lifespan allows us to consider all causes of mortality, reasonable and otherwise. To my knowledge, it’s never been proven reducing breast cancer by any means actually increases lifespan. It’s an assumption that treating disease leads to increased lifespan. It’s logical, but hard, expensive, and takes a very long time to study.
The meta analysis looks at 28 studies of breast cancer mortality reduction…the comparison groups are those who don’t use mammogram for detecting breast cancer. We have tons of data on rate of death for many diseases over many decades; we assume old rates are relevant today, and that’s a big issue with vaccines. Because the diseases the last few decades of childhood vaccines have been intended to prevent have become so rare, what is the acceptable risk from the vaccine itself? In the old days, risk of disease was high. But now risk of disease is low and our ability to treat is better. A similar argument can be made for breast cancer: treatment is better now than 20 years ago, does early detection still matter?
The rabbit holes go deep. But one common theme you’ll find is the real science rabbit holes are unbelievably deep; the pseudoscience rabbit holes are rather shallow, surprisingly shallow some times.