Reassurance is appropriate only after clinical, radiological, and pathological assessment

EDITOR–Reed's Personal View about her doctors' failure to investigate her breast cancer is generous.1 The incidence of breast cancer in her age group may be low but is not negligible, being 25/100 000 in those aged 30-35.2It would not be acceptable in a breast clinic to reassure a 32 year old woman on the assumption that a palpable lump is a fibroadenoma without having done adequate triple assessment by clinical, radiological, and pathological methods. The risk in Reed's case was not just the loss of a breast; it was the loss of a daughter, a sister, a partner, a friend, and, most tragically, a mother of a young child.

The general …