Grade 2 infiltrating ductal

I think I get what you are saying. A diagnosis of BC sends us into panic mode. We want it gone and we want the doctors to give us some sort of guarantee that the treatment they recommend for us will stop it coming back, ever! When a doctor tells us that chemo will not make very much difference to our chance of recurrence we want absolutes. They cannot give us this because the statistics say there is a small chance that it might. Eg for every 100 people with the same stage/pathology of cancer, chemo might prevent a recurrence for 1 or 2. The dilemma begins. Those people search for some sort of answer as to what they should do. They are surrounded by information/media that promotes stories of women with BC all having chemo to 'beat' this disease. It is very hard to feel confident in making a calculated rational decision rather than an emotional one based on fear of recurrence. You would like to see a more balanced rational approach to promoting the fact that for people with very early breast cancer, chemo does more harm than good. I think there are a number of breast cancer associated issues that suffer from the same emotional and unbalanced promotion. We tend to hear about the horror stories of people getting BC more than once and we think this happens more often than it actually does. I wonder about the increasing number of women undergoing double mastectomies out of fear of getting BC in the other breast. In some cases the chance of this may actually be very low. But we are influenced by the stories we hear. Debate over treatment issues is needed to enable women to make informed treatment choices. You are right we do not need to create a war with emotional responses but need to consider the realities in respectful ways. Deanne