Women's attitudes to false positive mammography results

doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7273.1409

BMJ 2000;321:1409 ( 2 December )

Letters

Women's attitudes to false positive mammography results

A formerly clueless patient responds

People in the United States may ignore harms of screening

Findings may not apply to United Kingdom

Authors' reply

A formerly clueless patient responds

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ I am a patient who received a diagnosis of low grade ductal carcinoma in situ in 1997, on my 43rd birthday, after obtaininga routine screening mammogram showing a cluster of indeterminatemicrocalcifications. Although I consider myself informed aboutwomen's health, I was ambushed by this news. Like the patientsin the study by Schwartz et al,¹ I had never heard of ductalcarcinoma in situ until it became a terrifying issue that putmy life onhold.

Surveying the literature written for patients makes it easy to understand why someone like me could have missed this. I ransackedit, starting with the copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves² thatI grabbed from my bookshelf on the day I came home to an ominousmessage on my answering machine from the radiology clinic. Inthe 30 pages about breast cancer, the only comment about suspiciousmammograms was buried in a . . . [Full text of this article]

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Carter, J. (2004). Doctors' communication of trust, care, and respect: Communication needs of all kinds of people should be explored. BMJ 328: 1318-1318 [Full text]