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The reason more young women are having breast cancer scares is that we are doing screening without scientific justification for the benefits being greater than the costs. The result is millions of false positives and hundreds of thousands of women (and a few men) being treated for what Dr. H. Gilbert Welch calls 'pseudodisease.' It is no secret that breast cancer is the disease most likely to lead to a malpractice lawsuit, and is thus the most overscreened, overdiagnosed and overtreated disease around. Once you take that unnecessary mammogram, there is no stopping the medical scare industry, you will do the next needless procedure, and the next, and the next.

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We have been looking at the air for several decades now. Numerous cities had much worse pollution during the peak years of the industrial age. And people were much more exposed to dangerous chemicals than they are now, but the exposure illness rates were still lower than they are today. What we have not been looking at, except on the fringes, is nutrition. 200 years ago, for instance, because of the much higher level of physical activity, the average person consumed twice as many calories. The need for calories has dropped, but not the need for micro-nutrients, vitamins and minerals Even with a perfectly balanced diet, the average citizen today would be deficient in most vitamins and minerals. A very healthy body is much more able to defend itself against contaminants, physical and emotional stress and the body's own weaknesses, many of which after decades of poor nutrition result in serious illnesses. Stop looking at the air and start looking at nutrition. This is a vastly underfunded and under-researched component of our health care system and you need to read a lot of books by a lot of different authors to become even conversant on the topic. And once you are, you realize that a lot of it is still theory. You have to study, experiment and learn from experience as well as from books. A few good authors for starters are Adelle Davis and Earl Mindell. But that is just a starting point. Many chronic or severe illnesses are simply the result of chronic stress and inadequate nutrition to deal with it. So whatever organ or aspect of the body that is weakest to start with gives way and illness takes hold. I don't know that serious illnesses, once contracted can be fought off by any nutritional therapy, but it would help. You can also begin to pass on to younger people the need for nutritional education. By the way, I am 53 years old and don't have any chronic illnesses. I reared 3 children to adulthood with no hospitalizations, broken bones or serious illnesses. In fact, I can count on my fingers all of the minor illnesses they had, sniffles, coughs, etc throughout their childhood. Part if it might just be luck, but even accidents are often preceeded by low blood sugar or other nutritional problems that reduce alertness. And, I am not a food nazi either. Most of the people that I know who are very rigorous about sugar and processed foods are just as sickly as everyone else, they just spend more time worrying about food. Get educated, really educated and it doesn't take all that much effort to keep healthy. I use chemicals to clean house, to spray for bugs and I eat mostly regular food from the grocery store. I get just as much chemical exposure as anyone else. I realize that the actual cause of many illnesses is not known. Given that so little is "known" about nutrition by the medical community and I think that points to a link. And, because the pharmaceutical and medical communities spend so little on nutrition...all of the available information is accessible to you. Best wishes to all. Gail Spurlock

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I have MS. So far, they don't exactly know what causes MS, but there is strong suspicion that envioronmental triggers are a huge part... and I don't doubt it. In just my circle of friends, family and acquaintences alone, I knew 10 people with MS before I was diagnosed. Little did I know that I already have it. Now that I know I have MS, the people are coming out of the woodwork. And the estimated 400,000 people that the National MS Society will say have it is an extremely low number, and extremely outdated. Montel Williams has MS, as you may know, and has his own little foundation that does it's own research. Their number is more than twice that... in America alone. We're talking millions of Americans with MS, both diagnosed and undiagnosed. (I had it for over a decade that was misdiagnosed as something else before a new doctor came along and opened my eyes). YES... Environmental factors are playing a part in many, many illnesses. Deceivingly so. Kudos for this article.

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Yes it's in the air. My whole household has been sick for years, and everyone I know. They spray us from the contrails so we go to the doctors who prescibe the medications and who profits ... the pharmeceutical companies, that's who. And who is profiting from their investments and kickbacks from those companies. Countless rich. I won't point a finger at anyone, not the government, or the elite bankers, but people need to wake up before they die. We are all expendable. But the longer they keep us alive at thousands of dollars each in medical care the richer they get. It's a matter of national security what they are spraying on us in those contrails. So we get no answers, but get sicker every day. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, unfortunately this is the Lord's way.

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December 18, 2007 Dear Ms. Estrich, I read your column about health issues in this country in Monday's Huntsville Times. Thanks for writing that column, maybe the rest of the Fourth Estate will pick up where you left off and demand accountability in health care from the government instead of constantly focusing on the latest celebrity debacle. (But probably not) The fact is that the state of health care in this country is a disgrace, and deliberately so, there is big money to be made in the way that disease is treated in the United States. The good news is the Alternative Medicine community and its supporters are way ahead of you on this one. Although constantly persecuted and vilified by Big Medicine and its government lapdogs, there are in fact cures for cancer through alternative medicine that don't involve radioactivity/surgery/chemotherapy. You can't tell your friends about them however, since it is illegal in this country to propose that cancer or other disease can be alleviated using other methods than those approved by Big Pharma and the AMA. I seriously believe that the extraordinary exposure to pesticides, chemicals, drugs and electronic devices is turning us into a nation of cripples (with help from our awful diet). I mean, who ever heard of Attention Deficit Disorder 40 years ago? This and a plateful of other diseases with fancy names weren't widely known because they didn't exist. The really sad truth is that a few decades from now these will be known as the good old days if we don't change now. If you really want a scare read Robert Dufty's Fateful Harvest, the story of how chemicals and heavy metals from factory smokestacks are mixed with fertilizer and sprayed on your food plants. Anyway, thanks for your column about one of my pet peeves. You could really step out and write a series on the topic, but the agents of evil/mammon would probably persecute you. Sincerely, Ben Gremillion Jr. Copernicus was right.