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Via the Boston Globe, reporting on a Harvard Medical Center survey to establish the effectiveness of mammograms by age group screened:
So if you're in your 50s and have a mammogram with a positive finding for breast cancer, the odds that you have breast cancer are more than 6000 to 1. (No, not 600 to one. You didn't have one mammogram; you had 10, a mammogram per year.) Odds that you are a woman in your 50s who develops breast cancer: somewhere around 1 in 60.
Seems like we might be better off randomly biopsying the population. We could use social security numbers like for the draft.
Or use a magic 8 ball. (Outlook good.)
Early detection is maybe not a thing we can actually do.
Then again, I just sent in my CV to be considered for a Studio Canal paid internship. (I have so much love for Studio Canal.) Any time you apply for something and say in the cover letter "I don't speak French, but I still think I would do really well at this job in France," you gotta think: here is somebody who doesn't care about the odds.
They calculated that 10 in 10,000 women in their 50s who are screened every year for a decade will avoid a breast cancer death; 6130 women, on the other hand, will have a false positive result that requires extra X-rays and 940 will have biopsies for non-malignant findings.
So if you're in your 50s and have a mammogram with a positive finding for breast cancer, the odds that you have breast cancer are more than 6000 to 1. (No, not 600 to one. You didn't have one mammogram; you had 10, a mammogram per year.) Odds that you are a woman in your 50s who develops breast cancer: somewhere around 1 in 60.
Seems like we might be better off randomly biopsying the population. We could use social security numbers like for the draft.
Or use a magic 8 ball. (Outlook good.)
Early detection is maybe not a thing we can actually do.
Then again, I just sent in my CV to be considered for a Studio Canal paid internship. (I have so much love for Studio Canal.) Any time you apply for something and say in the cover letter "I don't speak French, but I still think I would do really well at this job in France," you gotta think: here is somebody who doesn't care about the odds.
