Nearly 100,000 individuals have signed a petition demanding an alternative breast cancer screening approach besides “painful” mammography.
Dutch woman Murial van der Draaij first launched the effort, which amassed 98,918 signatures as of March 28. She labeled the imaging examinations as “torture,” forcing women to have their “breasts squashed with great force” and leaving them sore for weeks, according to a Google translation of the webpage.
Van der Draaij and co-signatories planned to submit a “citizens’ initiative” to the Netherlands House of Representatives, hoping to draw attention to alternatives such as ultrasound.
“Only mammography is used for breast cancer screening in the Netherlands, which is (very) painful for many women because the breast is pressed firmly under a compression plate,” the translated webpage notes. “A (less painful) method with pressure-controlled mammography has been developed, which is used in some medical centers, but not by the Netherlands population screening [program].”
Van der Draajj’s drive first started a few years ago when she received a screening exam at age 50, RTL News reported. She posted about the poor experience on Facebook and found that others felt the same. “The responses poured in. Women who had gotten blue breasts and were still bothered by the mammography for weeks,” she said.
With the signature drive crossing the 40,000 mark, she is able to present the matter to her country’s House of Representatives to compel them to respond, the report noted.
Radiologist Martin Wasser with Leiden University Medical Center also spoke with the RTL News, discussing possible alternatives to traditional mammography. Mamma CT, for one, allows women to lie down on their stomach, without the required compression. However, the technology is unproven, expensive and unable to be deployed among the more than 800,000 women participating in the Netherlands’ population screening program, Wasser noted. Ultrasound alone, meanwhile, does not offer the same benefits as mammography.
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Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.