02/20/2017 / By Ethan Huff
The Walmart Foundation has issued a $300,000 grant to the American Cancer Society (ACS) that is specifically to be used in pushing more mammogram screenings on low-income, African-American women living in three American cities. Poorer, black women in Jackson, Mississippi; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Portsmouth, Virginia will be told that in order to avoid developing breast cancer, they will need to undergo a routine screening procedure that science has repeatedly shown actually causes breast cancer, all in the name of prevention, of course.
According to the ACS press release, this Walmart money will increase women’s access to mammograms, supposedly in order to prevent “more than half of cancer deaths.” Besides mammograms, the women in the three cities will also be instructed on ways to change their lifestyle habits to help them avoid developing breast cancer in the first place, which include eating better (what this entails in the view of ACS is unclear), avoiding cigarettes, and avoiding being overweight.
The latest ACS figures suggest that cancer rates are disproportionately higher in low-income, disadvantaged communities, which the group claims is a direct result, in large part, of poorer women not having access to machines that press their breasts between two plates to look for tumors. By getting more women into this grotesque screening routine, the stated plan is to detect more cancers earlier in order to sign these same women up for chemotherapy and radiation treatments as quickly as possible.
“We are grateful to the Walmart Foundation for its collaboration with the Society, and for this commitment of additional resources to help us deliver on our lifesaving mission within these communities,” announced Terry Music, chief mission delivery officer at ACS. “The Walmart Foundation’s community-based investment will help the Society make a positive impact in these communities by providing resources and information to help people stay well.”
It all sounds so nice and benevolent if you know nothing about the dangers of mammograms. Because really, what kind of monster wouldn’t want to shower the disadvantaged with greater access to lifesaving medical procedures like mammograms, right? But when you dig a little deeper into what mammograms actually entail and how they put women at risk, it becomes clear that there is another agenda afoot than simply helping the poor.
As you may recall, the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) issued a statement of its own back in 2009 explaining that mammograms significantly increase women’s risk of developing breast cancer. The screening procedure is also notorious for producing false positives, which lead to unnecessary biopsies and other treatments that further put women at risk of complications. All around, mammograms are a high-risk procedure that really have no place in modern medicine, especially when safer and more effective alternatives like thermography are readily available.
This is really just Walmart’s way of following in the footsteps of criminal Farid Fata, a former medical doctor who lost his medical license in 2015 for conspiring to falsely screen patients for cancer, and then treat them for cancers they didn’t even have. On top of this, Fata was convicted of defrauding both Medicare and insurance companies of more than $30,000,000.
Being that it’s a large, multi-national corporation simply donating money — at least on the surface — Walmart’s grant to the ACS didn’t receive the attention that Fata’s case did. But the repercussions of it, if the public is ever even made privy to them, will likely be the same: more women receiving false cancer diagnoses resulting in unneeded treatment, and more women developing cancer because of the screening itself. Follow more news about cancer screening scams at CancerScams.com.
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Tagged Under: cancer, mammograms, Walmart