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Got questions for the doctor about annual cancer screenings? Text them to “646464” (OHOHOH).

A change in health practices and diet, especially avoiding over-processed foods, may play a major role in preventing certain kinds of cancer and many screening tests may cause more harm than good, a surgeon and author contends.

“What’s interesting is that breast, prostate and colon tumors are very similar and are affected positively or negatively by the same actions,” Dr. Christine Horner writes in “Waking The Warrior Goddess: Dr. Christine Horner’s Program to Protect Against and Fight Breast Cancer.”

Horner’s advice is pretty much the same advice most medical professionals urge: eat healthy, organic food, get proper rest, exercise, take supplements and avoid what is bad for you.

Horner, who lost her mother to cancer, pushed through federal and state legislation ensuring that breast reconstruction after a mastectomy would be paid for by insurance companies and is a former Kentucky state spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society.

Her emphasis, though, is on preventing cancer and avoiding what she calls “unnecessary screenings.”

While the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recommends that women 50 and older have mammograms every other year and the American Cancer Society recommends annual mammograms after age 40, Horner has said the radiation mammogram screening emits makes it counterproductive to preventing breast cancer.

In April, a study in Norway estimated that 15 to 25 percent of breast cancers found by mammograms wouldn’t have caused any problems during a woman’s lifetime, but were being treated anyway. Early tumors, once detected, usually are removed and the patient is treated with chemotherapy or radiation because there’s no way to be certain whether the tumors are dangerous or benign.

“None of these screenings are perfect” Horner has said. “There’s a real problem with over diagnosis, especially in the United States, and in many cases too many people are being put under the knife for no reason.”

The question, however, is whether the outcomes are different for black women who are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, but when they do, they are more likely to die.

According to a study at the University of North Carolina schools of Public Health and Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, black women under the age of 50 have a 77 percent higher mortality rate from breast cancer than other women of the same age. Further, younger, pre-menopausal black women are more prone to an especially aggressive type of cancer.

Many black medical experts take exception to the suggestion that black women would benefit from fewer mammograms and many African-American health care professionals continue to recommend that black women above age 40 have annual checkups, including mammograms.

“The biggest drawback of screenings,” Horner has said, “is that they are used to find problems, not prevent problems.

“Breast, prostate and colon cancer all have one thing in common: the cancer tumors are similar, which means that the same actions fuel them and the same lifestyle changes prevent them.”

Click here for answers to your cancer screening questions.