Cancer screening: Doing more harm than good?

Suzanne Bull always half expected that she'd get cancer. After all, she lived in Marin County, California, where breast cancer rates are among the highest in the country. Still, she was determined to do whatever she could to protect herself. She ate right and exercised, and every year, she went into San Francisco to get a mammogram.

Last year, when Bull was 54, she got the news she'd been dreading. An ultrasensitive digital mammogram showed a suspicious spot on her left breast. A biopsy confirmed it was cancer. Fortunately, the surgeon told her, it had been caught early: She had ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, which meant that the cancer was still confined to a single milk duct. And it might well stay there, he added, since DCIS generally doesn't become invasive. That all sounded great, Bull recalls, until the surgeon told her that there was no way to know whether her cancer would turn out to be the lazy, nonthreatening type of DCIS or the potentially invasive kind. She needed a lumpectomy, he told her, and should also consider undergoing radiation and taking the drug tamoxifen.

Bull agonized over the decision for two weeks but in the end went ahead with the lumpectomy and radiation. "I had to do everything I could to stop this disease," she says. With two clean mammograms behind her, Bull feels lucky. "I'm just glad I had access to digital mammography," she says. "It finds things so much earlier."