For the last twenty years the American Cancer Society has urged women to perform monthly breast self-exams (BSE), and most of us didn’t do them (86 percent) for a variety of reasons: we didn’t know how to do them, we didn’t know what we should be looking for, we didn’t have time, and we generally felt incompetent and just left it to the experts. Every year at our annual checkups we would do the walk of shame when our doctors asked us if we did our breast exams. One time I asked, sheepishly, if I counted that my husband checked my breasts all the time. My doctor cracked up and wrote in my chart, “Twice weekly, by husband.”
Then I got breast cancer twice, and my life was spared twice because of early detection; so I started taking self-exams seriously and joined Plexus Pink as a way of giving women every advantage in the fight against breast cancer. And wouldn’t you know it, that very month the American Cancer Society changed its recommendations on BSE because the research had not shown a drop in mortality resulted from BSE. ACS doesn’t discourage women from doing monthly exams, but they no longer urge us to do them. Other major Breast Cancer organizations have incorporated the ACS data into their literature, but still recommend the practice of regular BSE, and I agree with them. Since 70 percent of all breast cancers are self or spouse detected, AND since mammograms miss 20 percent of tumors, my position is to equip women to do their exams with more skill and confidence so they don’t have to rely solely on mammograms.
Just for the record, the same research upon which the ACS based the change in their BSE recommendations ALSO found that clinical breast exams—that’s right, the ones your doctor performs—also did not cause a decline in mortality rates. It will be interesting to see how many doctors stop doing them.
