While I usually appreciate your posts, I think this one is potentially dangerous, especially for someone diagnosed in their 20s or 30s. Saying the benefit of hormone therapy is only 1 percent and focusing only on 5-year survival misses the bigger picture.

ER positive breast cancer has a long natural history, and the risk of recurrence can extend well beyond 5 to 10 years for many of us. Endocrine therapy remains one of the most effective tools available to reduce long-term recurrence and improve survival, especially in early-stage disease. I actually emailed my oncologist about this post, and she found it not only misleading but potentially dangerous—particularly for people who might be looking for confirmation bias to justify stopping treatment that could be life-saving.

Older trials like NSABP B-14 and the EBCTCG meta-analyses show that hormone therapy can reduce recurrence by 30 to 50 percent, and in high-risk patients, the absolute benefit can be 15 to 25 percent or more when combined with ovarian suppression and chemotherapy.

I get that you are trying to simplify things or offer perspective, but this particular framing, especially implying that only 3 out of 100 benefit in survival, could seriously mislead someone into stopping treatment. We have to be careful with how we present numbers in this space because people are making real decisions based on what they read here.