Top 5 Most Repeated Health Myths – Myth #4

Medical screening and treatments prevent death.

Even though the medical community advocates for regular screenings for those with illnesses, they may bring little benefit and may actually pose harm to your health. This applies to almost every type of medical screening for cancer and several other diseases.

Medical screening carries an immense risk in itself, not only due to the damage inflicted by screening techniques on the human body, but by the very nature of medical follow-up protocols. These protocols usually encourage patients to enter deeper into more invasive techniques, which further cripple health and lead to a very high percentage of fatalities.

In a Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of the mammographically detected tumors weren’t tumors at all. These “false positives” aren’t just financial and emotional strains, they may also lead to many unnecessary and invasive biopsies. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of all positive mammograms do not, upon biopsy, show any presence of cancer.

A prostate (PSA) blood test looks for prostate-specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate gland. High levelsare supposedly associated with prostate cancer. The problem is that the association isn’t always correct, and when it is, the prostate cancer isn’t necessarily deadly. Only about 3 percent of all men die from prostate cancer. The PSA test usually leads to overdiagnosis — biopsies and treatment in which the side effects are impotence and incontinence.

Repeated biopsies may spread cancer cells into the track formed by the needle, or by spilling cancerous cells directlyinto the bloodstream or lympathic system.

News coverage of many diseases focus too much on treatments and not enough on prevention, a trend that could prove risky in the long run for most people who don’t understand how to take care of their health. The biggest single type of story we usually hear about on the news involves treatment, and narratives lend themselves much better to that kind of story. Stories about prevention, about people exercising and eating right, just don’t make great copy.

If our current treatment approach to health continues, hundreds of years from now, mankind may look back at today’s “modern medicine” and think: “How could they have been so primitive in ideology and so wrong?

What lack of humanitarianism in government allowed the medical industries to kill people with economically driven false beliefs and ideas? Why didn’t government stop them? Who were the people in charge of protecting those citizens?

Preventive education demands increased funding for research into new dietary, physical activity, behavioral, socioeconomic, environmental and medical approaches for the prevention of chronic disease. Children who grow into teenagers and then adults require more accountability for their own well-being through health conscious decisions which are motivated by proper practical and theoretical applications. They need to know that treatment modalities and pharmaceutical applications may not save their health in the future.

Substantial political and financial contributions are also imperative to invest in prevention more effectively to regulate revisions and mandate policies which affect the governing bodies of health and education. Any procrastination or failure to resolve these matters in the next decade will only lead to the further deterioration of human health and healthcare systems. 

Proper leadership and effective communication regarding these preventive measures may still reverse screening/treatment trends and consequently reverse this thinking to ultimately promote a healthier aging population.