Breast Lesions
Breast Lesions - A Large Gray Area
There is a good deal of controversy within the medical world as how best to deal with breast lesions. What is generally known and agreed upon is that the vast majority of breast lesions are benign, and only a tiny fraction ever develop into invasive breast cancer. The term breast lesions has not been used a great deal in these discussions regarding mammogram screenings, but one of the purposes of a mammogram is to detect breast lesions. In fact as the technology has improved, mammogram screening has been able to detect smaller and smaller breast lesions.
Psychology A Factor - The problem surrounding breast lesions and the mammogram controversy is not so much one of a breast lesion being a bad thing. Most are not. The problem often is one of over reaction and over treatment of these lesions, which in extreme cases can lead to mastectomies which are not really needed. While "better safe than sorry" sometimes applies in prevention of invasive cancer, such an approach can sometimes do more harm than good.
Part of the problem surrounding breast lesions is psychological. Most women have a basic fear of breast cancer. While this fear is justified in many respects, it is often based on misconceptions, the most common one being that a large percentage of women are at risk in developing the disease. Statistics prove otherwise, the percentage really being quite small. Still, if 1%, rather than 20% of women over a certain age are at risk, that still represents a large number of people.
The Need For Clarification - One problem may be that the amount of information published regarding the nature of breast lesions is somewhat limited, at least as far as information presented in terms the layman can understand is concerned. Statistically, a breast lesion, especially a small one, is of little consequence, and if left alone will often disappear on its own. The problem of course, is that if left unnoticed or unattended, the lesion may eventually become malignant and set the stage for in invasive cancer to develop. There are no general guidelines as to how best to deal with these lesions, though one guideline suggests that any lesion over one centimeter in size should probably be removed and subjected to a biopsy. Other sources suggest that any lesion discovered should be removed by excision, thereby lessening the chances of a malignant lesion going unattended and untreated.
One Big, Grey Area - Different doctors, clinics, and hospitals often take different approaches to the treatment of breast lesions. In some cases excisions, up to and including mastectomies are the general practice, other professionals recommend radiation treatment as the best approach, and still others rely on the medication, tamoxifen. The treatment you receive for breast lesions may well depend upon where you live and who you see. At the root of all this confusion is the medical professions inability to determine, at the present time, whether a specific lesion is a "good one' or a "bad one" until it is removed.
The course of treatment therefore, can easily become a course of over treatment, but this will likely continue as long as the knowledge about breast lesions remains in such a grey area. Until more is known about breast lesions, their cause and characteristics, the adage “better safe than sorry" is perhaps the best course of action after all, stopping short of undergoing unnecessary mastectomies. At least one should be able to take some comfort in the knowledge that the presence of a lesion does not signal the onset of a malignancy. In most cases such a presence means very little.