Thread by @MichaelBaum11

I have been provoked to start a webinar about progress in breast cancer care following the tragic early death of Sarah Harding as covered in the Times today. That together with the flood of tweets implying that delay in diagnosis was to blame./1
thetimes.co.uk/article/sarah-…

My mother died in her early 60s in uncontrolled pain from skeletal metastases. She had neglected herself and presented with advanced disease.I was a young surgeon at the time and decided to devote my career to the management of this disease. /2

27 years ago my beloved young sister noticed a small lump in her breast and I made sure that she was treated promptly with breast conserving surgery and 5 years adjuvant tamoxifen. I claim to be one of the pioneers responsible for these interventions./3
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_B…

I was also one of the architects of the NHS Breast Screening Programme and opened the first unit in the SE of England in 1988. Edwina Currie MP cut the ribbon and boasted about this achievement in parliament./4
theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=19…

Women who had negative findings on mammography were taught the correct way of Breast Self Examination (BSE) In the fullness of time we learnt the errors of our ways as the Cochrane overview of 3 large RCTs of BSE led to 2x negative biopsies and no impact on deaths from CaB/5

As the evidence built up that mammography screening was not delivering the promise of lives and breasts saved I resigned from the NHSBSP steering committee. This was vindicated by the Cochrane overview in 2006. The figure attached sums up the benefit v harms.

Sadly the belief that "catching it early" will save lives doesn't seem to work as we hoped. We must learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. What we can learn and how we can redirect breast cancer research demands a paradigm shift that I will address tomorrow.