Why is there still a breast cancer epidemic despite billions in research funding?
In the pre-pandemic days, when we were able to focus on other diseases besides COVID, there were annual gala events to raise awareness, and funds, for breast cancer research. Literally billions of dollars went to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which made a lucrative art out of fundraising off of breast cancer, as well as to the venerable American Cancer Society, all with the promise of finding a cure.
Corporate virtue signaling in those days meant showing you were “pink” for breast cancer awareness month. Everything went pink, including football games. You couldn’t leave the grocery store without being hit up for a donation to some breast cancer charity, usually the ACS or the Komen Foundation. They made breast cancer fun, and profitable, for everyone, except for the women who went on to develop breast cancer.
Now, after decades of this highly-funded war on breast cancer, the incidence and death rates from this terrible disease are — get ready for it — about the same.
What went wrong?
Why did billions of dollars and decades of research fail to make a significant dent in the breast cancer epidemic?
Obviously, money can’t buy everything. It can’t, for example, make these researchers question their approach, which is still failing to explain the cause of over 70% of breast cancer cases.
Why can’t they change? The goal of the medical and research community is to make money for shareholders. Clearly, their current approach is a great business model.
Indeed, breast cancer is now a multi-billion dollar business, offering genetic screening, tamoxifen, and preventative breast removal (prophylactic mastectomy) to prevent breast cancer before it occurs; mammography, ultra-sound, and thermography for diagnosing the tumor as early as possible; radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy for treatment of the cancer; and mastectomy bras, lymphedema support groups, and breast implants afterwards.
These people have the audacity to call themselves “experts”. Of what? Of their failed research and treatment approach?
Time for a change
Their problem is the way modern medicine is framing breast cancer theories. They are using a biochemical model of breast cancer, hoping to come up with a drug to block some yet undiscovered biochemical process that causes cancer. They consider the body to be a biological machine, and believe the same mechanisms apply to other animals, too, making rats and mice the most studied organism for human breast cancer.
It never occurred to these breast researchers to consider what human women do to their breasts that rats and mice do not. Women wear bras. And bras are designed to be tight.
It should not be news to anyone, even the genius scientists studying the mammary glands of mice, that tight clothing can interfere with circulation. There are lots of studies showing the negative impacts of tight bras, including a reduction in immune function, the congestion of the breasts with lymph fluid, and overall reduction in blood and lymph circulation, compression injuries to nerves resulting in headaches and backaches, and even changes in body temperature, menstrual cycle duration, digestion and melatonin secretion, and breast cancer.
Dressed to Kill
My wife and I performed the world’s first study directly examining the bra-cancer link, called the 1991-93 US Bra and Breast Cancer Study, published in the 1995 book, Dressed to Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras, updated for a Second Edition in 2018.
Our study consisted of about 4,700 women, nearly half of whom had breast cancer, and asked about their past bra usage habits. Our results were stunning, and suggested that bra-free women have about the same risk of breast cancer as men, while the tighter and longer a bra is worn the higher the incidence rises, to over 100 times higher for a 24/7 bra-user compared to a bra-free woman.
The theory behind the bra link to cancer is that bras are tight and impair the circulation of blood and lymph in the breasts. This results in fluid accumulation and breast pain and cysts, as well as the progressive toxification of the breasts. This can ultimately lead to cancer. See the article, How Bras Cause Lymph Stasis and Breast Cancer.
At first, we were ignored by governmental and private cancer organizations and women’s groups. Questioning bras was too titillating and embarrassing for even medical people to discuss without blushing. Merely suggesting a connection was considered absurd, and all the experts, including the National Cancer Institute, arrogantly insisted bras could not cause cancer.
Nevertheless, our book was a media success, but it could have been bigger were it not met with disdain and denials by the experts, like the American Cancer Society. The bra industry threatened my publisher with a lawsuit if he published, which never materialized, a story the publisher shares in the Second Edition of the book.
Bra-dom versus Freedom
Since announcing this discovery in 1995, many women who heard about it tried loosening up or eliminating their bras, and discovered for themselves how much healthier they felt without a tight brand around their breasts and chest. We document women’s experiences becoming bra-free in our ongoing International Bra-Free Study. The preliminary findings are in the report, If Breasts Could Talk.
For 20 years, the American Cancer Society led the pack of experts in denying any bra-cancer link. They discouraged further research, and claimed the link was implausible. The ACS also receives funding from the bra industry, and sells mastectomy bras. For the medical cabal opposing the link, the growing awareness of, and support for, the bra-cancer issue demanded some drastic action. So the National Cancer Institute, which mirrors the ACS position on this issue, funded research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to disprove the bra-cancer link.
In brief, this study was only on post-menopausal women, and did not include any women under 55, so the results have limited applicability to young and middle-aged women. There were also no women who were bra-free, so there was no control group for comparison. However, you can’t determine scientifically if wearing a bra is a problem if you don’t have bra-free women for comparison.
This lone study opposing the bra-cancer link was clearly biased and designed to find no difference in bra usage and cancer incidence, and it did what it had set out to do. The lead researcher, named Ms Chen, who was a graduate student, said this in a press release by Fred Hutchinson about the study, “We weren’t really surprised. We knew that the biological plausibility of a link between bras and breast cancer was really weak.”
Given the power of the medical industry and its control over the media, this one flawed study was touted as the final word on the matter. Around the world women were told they can wear bras without fear, due to this one, flawed study.
Positive Studies Ignored
This fake negative study from the US was followed by positive studies from Brazil, Kenya, China, Iran, Singapore and elsewhere, all showing a bra-cancer link. You will never hear about these studies, though. (See below for references.) They are taboo and hidden by western medicine’s censors.
It is now 30 years since the cancer industry has been resisting, suppressing, and censoring the bra-cancer link. You would think breast disease experts would first ask about bras when considering the cause of breast disease, just as podiatrists ask about shoes when considering the cause of foot disease. How can these breast disease “experts” now admit that this issue is valid and warrants further research, including a warning to women about this simple way to prevent breast cancer, when they have been working so hard to deny it all these years?
It is medically known that tight clothing is bad for circulation, if you bring the subject up with your doctor, although they will play it down. They will say there is a lack of research showing how bad tight clothing is to blood and lymphatic circulation, and will say they don’t know what happens from a lifetime of chronic clothing constriction. They also assume that if it was a significant problem, then there would have been tons of research showing that by now.
You would think cancer organizations would look at all leads to find a preventable cause of breast cancer. It’s amazing how negative they are on this lead.
Here is what the ACS says about the bra-cancer link as of 1/1/23, under Disproven or Controversial Breast Cancer Risk Factors:
“Online and social media rumors and at least one book have suggested that bras cause breast cancer by obstructing lymph flow. There is no scientific or clinical basis for this claim, and a 2014 study of more than 1,500 women found no association between wearing a bra and breast cancer risk.”
They are referring to the 2014 Hutchinson study mentioned above. Nowhere are other studies mentioned that support the link, or the fact that the 2014 study had no bra-free control group and only looked at post-menopausal women.
Why the resistance?
Why can’t they do further research, or even encourage further research? Why are they insistent that tight bras have nothing at all to do with breast cancer development?
It’s hard to put yourself into their heads, but my feeling is that the cancer industry cannot admit this issue has merit because it invalidates all their billions of dollars of research that ignored this vital risk factor for breast cancer. It’s like ignoring smoking while researching lung cancer, which researchers and the ACS did for years, denying the link and promoting smoking for health.
The psychological dependence women have on bras has helped this medical corruption continue. The cultural pressure to wear bras created a crisis for some women who heard about the hazards of bras. They needed to choose between comfort and health, or fashion and cultural norms. Women feeling the pressure to wear bras were happy to accept the denials from the medical industry, relieving their anxiety about the issue.
Where’s the Outrage!!!
You would think that women would be up in arms against the ACS and NCI for their corrupted denial of any merit to this issue, and their censorship of the many studies which show a link. There should be outrage. The cancer industry has pandered to women for breast cancer funding, only to deliberately and systematically ignore the one factor that women have control over to prevent this disease.
Unfortunately, the biases of the ACS are considered truth by new AI programs, like ChatGPT. It is nearly impossible to get past the misinformation, denials, and biased nonsense coming from AI about the bra-cancer link. Much of the misinformation comes from the Wikipedia page about Dressed to Kill, which is biased and managed by editors to exclude any support of the bra-cancer link.
Essentially, denial of the bra-cancer link has become dogma, institutionalized by the NCI, the Komen Foundation, the ACS, and all their copycat groups invested in early detection and drug treatments. Bras just get in the way of their business model.
It may be difficult to face this truth about the corruption of medicine. We want to have trust in our researchers and public health leaders. But we can’t. Disease is a business for them. And the more money they get, the more invested they become in the disease continuing.
What can you do about this? Must women be victims of this corruption? Here are some ideas:
- Don’t wait for the ACS to tell you how to prevent cancer. If they knew, it would impact detection and treatment profits, so they wouldn’t say unless if could make more money than currently made. If you have concerns about something causing cancer, then avoid it.
- It’s your life. Don’t rely on others to save you or give you the truth about your needs.
- Stop wearing bras. You can get support by joining the International Bra-Free Study.
- Do NOT donate to the ACS, Komen Foundation, or any other cancer nonprofit until it presents information about the bra-cancer link in an unbiased way and calls for more studies.
- Any breast cancer organization that does not mention the bra-cancer link is probably a shill for the drug industry, which controls medicine and the media narrative about health and cancer.
- Avoid tight clothing of all types.
- Avoid synthetic fabric next to your skin. It leaches toxins as it breaks down.
- Do not put cellphones in a bra. See my article, The Real Reason Why Cellphones Cause Breast Cancer.
- Avoid mammograms since these are x-rays and have a cumulative harmful impact on the breasts.
- If you opt for thermography as a safer alternative to x-rays, stop wearing a bra one month prior to your thermogram. See my article, How Thermography Can Prevent Breast Cancer.
- Imagine all the other causes of disease that the medical industry is ignoring and censoring.
Your health is your responsibility. Don’t expect the medical business to see you for anything more than a pawn for profit.