Animal trainers not doctors

Okay, this is getting to be a bit too much. I'm sorry but cancer detection by animals? Well, birds too.

This all seems to be going on in the UK. First of all, pigeons are being trained to read breast cancer imaging to diagnose breast cancer. Yes you read that right. Pigeons. You know the 'rats with wings' (as I call them) that populate many cities.

"Pigeons, with training, did just as well as humans in a study testing their ability to distinguish cancerous from healthy breast tissue samples."

I am so happy to hear that we no longer need radiologists to read our mammograms for breast cancer diagnoses. Instead of 3 years of medical school and four years of a radiology residency, we can have pigeons trained for a few weeks who can spend their lives reading mammograms.

"After two weeks of training, the pigeons reached a level of 85% accuracy. Because they successfully identified cancerous tissue from images they had not seen before, the researchers ruled out rote-learning of the images as an explanation."

Talk about a birdbrain.

Next we have dogs who sniff out cancer. I have heard of this before. We have Lucy's story. She failed guide dog school so her owners thought they should try medical detection instead.

"For the next seven years, Lucy learned to sniff out bladder, kidney and prostate cancer, and was even used in a study. Over the years, she has been able to detect cancer correctly more than 95% of the time. That's better than some lab tests used to diagnose cancer.

Now, Lucy is part of one of the largest clinical trials of canine cancer detection. A British organization, Medical Detection Dogs, has eight dogs sniff out 3,000 urine samples from National Health Service patients to see whether they can discern who has cancer and who doesn't."

Is this a good use of our medical research dollars? I am not so sure. I know people claim their dogs have sniffed out their cancer or stay very close when they are sick but again I do not think a dog is good substitute for a doctor. This research may make us think we need more animal trainers instead of doctors.

You think I make this stuff up? You can read about it the pigeons and the dogs.

Early detection and saving lives

Laurie over at Not Just About Cancer blogged about the myth of early detection and linked to a very good article on the same subject in Psychology Today. Early detection is supposed to be a good thing meaning they caught your disease (whatever it maybe) before it got really nasty.

Amy Robach and others say 'my mammogram saved my life'. But is this really true? I am not saying that they are lying but the question is did their mammogram really save their life? I have friends who believe the same thing. They attribute their still being alive because of their 'life saving mammogram'.

Let's take a look at this. First of all, as the Psychology Today article points out, if we were detecting more cancers earlier wouldn't the numbers for late detection or deaths be decreasing? They aren't.

"But this dramatic increase in "early-stage" diagnoses has not been followed with a decline in advanced breast cancers, as would be expected if early detection was the key to stopping progression."

Next, breast cancer is not a linear disease. There are many types which are more or less treatable and some it doesn't matter when they are caught, they are still going to kill you. And others are never going to be fatal and will resolve themselves. We just aren't very good about telling them apart. 

"For all we do not know about breast cancer (i.e., what exactly causes it, how to prevent it, how to keep it from recurring, how to keep people from dying from it if it spreads), there are things we do know. Breast cancer is complex. It stems from multiple causes, some of which include radiation, carcinogenic chemicals, and cancer promoters such as endocrine disrupting compounds(link is external). There are at least ten subtypes of breast cancer that behave and respond to treatments differently. One-size-fits-all treatment does not work. Mammograms do not prevent breast cancer; nor do they guarantee that the cancer found on a mammogram (if it is found on a mammogram) is indolent, lethal, or somewhere in between. Acknowledging these complexities would not only help to shift the breast cancer paradigm, it would serve those who want to be well informed."

So if you feel your mammogram saved your life, you may or may not be right.