How Mammograms Improve Survival but Not Mortality

[Recursion]

9. This does seem to raise more questions than answers

And I'd have to see the crosstabs to make any sensible judgement (and I probably couldn't then, since I'm an electrical engineer rather than a pathologist).

Ohheckyeah, above, postulates that the mammogram itself worsens the cancers that do happen and so could wash-out any advantage from earlier treatment (I'm agnostic on that, and I know it's controversial; but it's clearly not on its face implausible that physical compression and radiation would make cancers worse).

I could also imagine an interpretation that while the mammograms themselves don't do that, the unnecessary treatments resulting from false positives do.

To make sense of this we need to sort out whether this is because of the ill effects of mammograms, the ill effects of unnecessary treatments, or whether it's simply because early detection doesn't actually improve mortality.