Movie of the Week: October 28, 2024: bOObs: The War on Women's Breasts
“I’ve always told my patients: avoid the mammography merry-go-round.”
~ Dr. Toni Bark
The American public health and medical establishments recommend that women get screening mammography every other year for three and a half decades of their lives, starting at age 40, presenting it as the “standard of care.” The 2020 documentary bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts, directed by Megan S. Smith, casts doubt on that advice from just about every angle.
The film includes interviews with patients, mammogram-skeptical doctors in the U.S. and Europe, the American Cancer Society’s (ACS’s) chief medical-scientific officer, and others, including a conventional breast cancer surgeon convinced of the screening procedure’s benefits. Among other facts, we learn that mammography traumatizes the breasts with up to 45 pounds of pressure and irradiates “the most radiosensitive organ a woman has.” Augmenting the interviews with screenshots of unflattering conclusions published in the scientific literature, the film also explodes various myths, including the “early detection” myth, the “mammograms are accurate” myth, and the “biopsies are accurate” myth. Interviewees further explain that “dense” breasts absorb three to five times more radiation and apparently thwart mammography’s ability to see much of anything (it’s like “trying to find a polar bear in a snowstorm,” admits the breast surgeon).
On the biopsy topic, the film quotes a JAMA paper suggesting that one out of four breast biopsy results could be wrong (often realized after it is too late, i.e., post-mastectomy). In fact, bOObs presents convincing evidence that both biopsy and mammography can spread cancer. Citing a paper in Lancet Oncology, integrative oncologist Dr. Ben Johnson notes that women who get mammograms die more often than women who don’t. His conclusion: “Mammograms cause breast cancer, period.”
Other issues tackled in this comprehensive documentary include the problems of overdiagnosis and overtreatment, thermography as an alternative screening tool, the importance of second (and third) opinions, insurance issues, conflicts of interest, and the scam of “evidence-based medicine.”
One of the film’s frankest admissions occurs when the staid ACS’s Dr. Otis Brawley concedes that in 10% to 40% of women diagnosed with breast cancer through screening,
“[T]he tumors would never grow, never metastasize, never bother them. Think of it as, ‘yes, they have cancer,’ but God’s great plan is, they’re going to grow old and die of something totally unrelated if we didn’t tell them they have it and treat it.”
If that is what cancer insiders are saying, then this film performs an important service by bringing such observations to light.
Watch the film here.
Related:
bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts (website)
No Ma’am-ograms! by Ben Johnson, MD, DO, NMD
Mammography Screening Is Harmful and Should Be Abandoned