Blog #9, New Laws Add a Divisive Component to Breast Screening, Sydney St.Pierre

Medical groups everywhere are finding new things that they think patients should be aware of, the new one being "dense breast tissue". Laws are now being passed that is making places tell their patients whether their mammagram shows dense breast tissue if it does. It is possible that tissue can have tumors, or could be possible breast cancer in the future. Because of that their doctors are supposed to inform them if they will need further tests on the tissue. So far it has only been passed in a few states because the facilities are saying they shouldn't have to tell because they don't want to worry people for no reason, but then some of the people are arguing that they have the right to know something that could possibly mean something else. The first state to have this law was Connecticut because she went to legislators and told her story about them finding dense breast tissue in her, but not telling her, and then later on it turned into cancer. She wants to help other women so the same thing doesn't happen to them as well, because it's the sort of thing that can only be detected by a mammogram, not by simple touch. Dense tissue is a normal things and about 40% of women have it, but it's possibly doctors may read the tissue differently.  Unfortunately it is very possible that once the dense tissue is found or in any one else that when given an ultrasound it is more likely to find tumors or cancer that mammograms have missed. After that is it also possible that once it is biopsied it can turn out to be a false positive for cancerous tumors. This is going on because one lady had the power to speak up because if the doctors would have told her she would have asked for more tests to be done and her cancer could have possibly been found a lot sooner than the four of five years down the road it was actually found. Even though breast cancer is being teated everyday it is still a very deadly disease that people are dying from because it goes unchecked or just simply unnoticed. You can never be too careful because if you don't catch something in time by the time you finally do it could possibly be too late.

News Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/health/laws-tell-mammogram-clinics-to-address-breast-density.html?ref=health