February 16 - Artie

Today we're focusing our lens on a disease you've undoubtably heard something about. There are 230,000 new cases every year, making it the second most prevalent cancer in women, and in the U.S. as many as 1 / 8 women may be diagnosed at some point in their lifetime. The subject of our discussion today is Breast Cancer. Another reason you may have heard of breast cancer is that patients of this condition have rallied together successfully to build agencies and advocacy groups to strengthen public awareness, advocacy, and research on the topic. And a common goal for many of these groups is to encourage early detection of the cancer, because treatment is more successful if caught early. As with any medical test done in a doctors office, the tests aren't perfect. And the more tests you do the more potential there are for false alarms--results that indicate a problem when none exists. Now these don't happen that often, because then the tests would be bad and we wouldn't use them, but It does happen it can cause a lot of stress and anxiety. And there are healthy active debates on what measure of mistakes we are comfortable with for each test, if it means catching every case of cancer successfully. And guidelines vary and evolve between advocacy groups as to what tests are recommended. Some of this discussion boils down to numbers that epidemiologists like to crunch. But today we are lucky enough to add a human touch to the conversation. My guest is Artie, who shares her own battle with breast cancer at its 10 year anniversary.