I finished reading this book a few days ago and must say it was well presented and informative. I’m sceptical about the title - I feel the word “treatment” should have been the 4th word of the title. Anyway, I found it to be very helpful in explaining why we aren’t all sent for endless tests after adjuvant treatment although it lacked any information specific to those with a genetic mutation.
Musa Mayer is American and has written at least two other books and on the basis that this one helped me, I have ordered one of the others.
You say you found it “very helpful in explaining why we aren’t all sent for endless tests after adjuvant treatment”. We have had countless threads on here wondering why we only get further tests when presenting oncs with symptoms and not as a precaution.
Please could you brief us on her reason why, because we for the most part narrowed it down to cost cutting! You may have read these threads.
Once the cancer has spread beyond the breast it is basically treatable but not curable. The testare relatively crude in that they only show the metastatic cancer at a very advanced stage. by this stage it is normally giving symptoms to the woman who has metastatic cancer. Also there is no advantage to survival in having treatment earlier rather than later.
Tests beget tests as most people have some kind of result that is not wholly normal for something or other even if they are not ill.
The reason most people don’t get regular scans and tests for secondaries is that searching for secondaries before there are symptoms is not thought to prolong survival. Scans only show tumours of 1cm or more, so a ‘negative’ scan is no more than a snapshot in time.
There is a bit of evidence that eraly diagnosis of bone mets can lead to earlier tretament with biophosphonates and that this is a good thing…otherwise early detection of mets before symptioms show won’t lead to prolonged survival.
An annual mammogram and ultasound (if you have dense breast tissue) is probably a good idea since early diagnois of local recurrence or new primary can make a diifference.
Musa Meyer really does explain the arguments against lots of tests very well. another point is that blood tests (tumour markers) are often inaccurate and frequent testing may do nothing more than increase the number of false positives and generate more anxiety.
Jane
PS Posting at the same time as Mole…she’s summed it up much better than me.