Doctors Warn Angelina Jolie's Double Mastectomy is Not Relevant for Most Women and Not Without Risks

Angelina Jolie’s announcement on Tuesday regarding her decision to undergo a double mastectomy due to her genetic predisposition to develop breast cancer was largely based, according to her op-ed published in The New York Times, in her hope that it would serve as a reminder to other women in the same situation of their options.

And while the reaction has been largely positive, a number of doctors have taken to the media in an effort to qualify the actress’s statements.

Dr. H. Gilbert Welch is a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He is also the author of “Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit Health,” and, as he wrote in an op-ed of his own published by CNN, “I … understood her choice.”

However, Welch laments, what Jolie failed to mention is that only 1 percent of women carry the mutated gene BRCA 1 that Jolie has that increases a person’s risk of developing breast cancer by five fold and ovarian cancer by 10 fold.

“The majority of women … are at average risk for breast cancer,” Welch writes. “They are not Angelina Jolie. They should not have a preventative mastectomy.”

Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the director of the university’s Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research, addressed a separate issue in his op-ed also published by CNN.

“I have no doubt that this piece is causing many women across the country to think about their own health and chances of developing the disease,” Carroll writes in regards to Jolie’s article.

And, in a way, that is a good thing, he continues.

However, a double mastectomy is not without its risks, Carroll cautions, not only because it is a major procedure but because of the psychological consequences that, he says, some women experience afterward.

And ultimatley, Carroll says, it’s only 90 percent effective, leaving a 10 percent window that the cancer will grow in the chest wall, armpit or even the abdomen because, he says, “it’s pretty much impossible for even the best surgeon to remove all breast tissue from a woman.”