I am Jennie Dale. I am a breast cancer patient. In 2016, I co-founded Dense Breasts Canada, a non-profit that raises awareness and advocates for optimal breast cancer screening. I've spoken with hundreds of breast cancer patients across Canada, and it's an honour to be here tonight to represent them.
I could spend hours telling you about the damage the current breast screening guidelines are doing. I could tell you about Jennifer and Carolyn, who are in the committee room tonight. Both were diagnosed with later-stage breast cancer after not being given access to screening in their forties because of the current guidelines. Instead of lumpectomy and radiation, they were subjected to aggressive treatment—mastectomy, chemotherapy and lymph node dissection. I could tell you how they both missed critical years of work, how their families worried they would lose them and how they worry now about metastases. I could tell you they live with lingering pain and debilitating side effects, and I could tell you that the task force members who created these guidelines believe all of these are acceptable costs for Jennifer and Carolyn to pay in the name of not screening.
I could also tell you that, if Jennifer and Carolyn lived in B.C., Nova Scotia, P.E.I. or the Yukon, they could have self-referred for mammograms in their forties and been spared much of what they've gone through. I could tell you that, even though current research shows clear benefits to early detection, members of the task force don't believe that earlier screening results in better outcomes for enough women. Instead, they cling to the flawed findings of 40- to 60-year-old studies—like the CNBSS—that have now been discredited.
I could tell you more, but the one message I want to leave with you is that the current guidelines are harming Canadians and causing avoidable deaths. The very guidelines that everyone would expect to protect Canadians are doing the opposite. The task force is denying us the opportunity to access preventive health care that results in better outcomes. Their overstatement of harms and understatement of benefits are not based on modern science. Their paternalistic concern about anxiety caused by screening is not borne out by patients' lived experiences. Their insistence on shared decision-making perpetuates power imbalances between doctor and patient. Finally, their dismissal of the impact of the guidelines on patients' quality of life is reductive at best and callous at worst.
Please bring Canada into the modern era by using relevant, current and inclusive evidence. Don't allow a group of biased non-subject matter experts to continue to destroy Canadians' lives by denying us health care.
Thank you.