The Breast Cancer Screening Arcade and the Whack-A-Mole Efforts to Reduce Access to Screening

The effort to reduce access to breast cancer screening has been going on for decades. As each piece of misinformation has been published, scientific responses have exposed the fallacies, but then new alternative facts are generated. The effort has been compared to the arcade game Whack-a-Mole in which one false argument is addressed only to have a new one pop up to replace it. This has ranged from the false claim that early detection would have no effect on breast cancer, to the fallacious idea that early detection was leading to early deaths among young women, to the more recent false suggestion that tens of thousands of breast cancers found by mammography would disappear if left undetected. The following is a short review of a number of nonscientifically derived Moles that have been Whacked by science. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.