‘Oops... It Wasn’t Cancer After All,’ Admits the National Cancer Institute/JAMA

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After decades of wrongful cancer diagnoses and treatments, and millions harmed, the National Cancer Institute and high gravitas journals like JAMA finally admit they were wrong all along. 

Back in 2012, The National Cancer Institute convened an expert panel to evaluate the problem of cancer’s misclassification and subsequent overdiagnosis and overtreatment, determining that millions may have been wrongly diagnosed with “cancer” of the breast, prostate, thyroid, and lung, when in fact their conditions were likely harmless, and should have been termed “indolent or benign growths of epithelial origin.” No apology was issued.  No major media coverage occurred. And more importantly, no radical change occurred in the conventional practice of cancer diagnosis, prevention, or treatment.

Essentially, in one sleight of the semantic hand, entire swaths of the U.S., and global population, who thought they had “lethal cancer,” and were subsequently treated for it, often with violent procedures and treatments, were being told that “oops….we got that wrong. You never had cancer after all.”

If you look at the problem through just breast cancer overdiagnosis and overtreatment in the U.S. over the past 30 years, it has been estimated that approximately 1.3 million women were wrongly treated.  Most of these women still have no idea they were victims, and many have identified with their “aggressors” in Stockholm syndrome like fashion, because they think their “lives were saved” by unnecessary treatment, when in fact the side effects, both physical and psychological, have almost certainly reduced both the quality and duration of their lives.

I have watched the problem of overdiagnosis and overtreatment closely. I get daily updates from pubmed.gov on the topic, and increasingly, high impact and gravitas journals are reporting on this highly concerning phenomenon. Particularly relevant is a review published late last year, which I reported on in my article titled, “Astounding Number of Medical Procedures Have No Benefit, Even Harm - JAMA Study.”

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The JAMA study found that a wide range of standard medical procedures and interventions that millions are subjected to annually, are not evidence-based, as commonly assumed, and have little to no benefit, and may even be causing significant harm. As a result, I now believe that good medicine often involves doing as much as nothing as possible. I also think that people should be aware that any conventional cancer diagnosis has the ability to exert lethal harm via the nocebo effect, regardless of its accuracy (i.e., even a misdiagnosis can result in lethal consequences because the power of belief).

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