Myth: “Mammograms are low-dose radiation” #3

Hello bOObs Blogettes and HAPPY BELATED EASTER!

I decided to repost this blog so that the new people joining us might be alerted to this important information. Suffice to say this: The amount of radiation in a mammogram is much higher than the medical establishment is letting on.

Surprised? I was.

Here’s why this is so: When your doctor (or whomever) tells you that the radiation in a mammogram is “the same amount as you get from flying over the U.S. in an airplane,” it’s basically hogwash. I refer to this as “Zee Plane, Zee Plane!!” metaphor.

Why? Because whomever told you that left out (probably unwittingly) a key word: “Scattered.”

This puzzle took me quite a while to figure out. I finally put the pieces together after speaking with a prominent med school/university professor versed in radiation and dusting off my calculator from grad school.

I’ll tell you the highlights here, but if you want more details you can find it in my past blogs on dense breasts, 3D mammography, and my upcoming book with the tentative name of “bOObs: The Truth behind Breast Cancer Screening.”

Let’s start here: When doctors use “Zee Plane!” metaphor, most of them (including some radiologists I spoke to, surprisingly) don’t understand that the comparison with air travel only pertains to the “scattered” radiation created from the mammogram across the rest of the body — which has nothing to do with the amount of “absorbed” radiation from mammography going directly into the breast, and the one capable of causing cancer years later.

The absorbed radiation amount is much, much more and is the one in which women are concerned — in fact it can reach up to 20 times higher than what they’re conveying by using the “Zee Plane” metaphor. 

This metaphor is prominent throughout medicine and really should not be used. It’s repeated over and over in med schools and posted on all the major associations’ websites concerned with mammograms and radiation, which is perpetuating this harmful myth — unbeknownst to most doctors and to the detriment of women.

I’ve peeled away the onion layers on different reasons for why this is so in other blogs (besides the “scattered” wording problem, for starters), but I’ll write a quick overview here. The following are some of the larger issues contributing to the high radiation exposure from mammograms:

—  dense breast tissue (DBT) requires higher radiation to differentiate between DBT and cancer (both appear white on a mammogram);

— large breasts require extra views (unless the facility has extra large paddles);

— 3D mammography, the majority of the time, is taken in conjunction with 2D mammography X-rays so you’re getting twice the radiation right off the bat (I’ve done an entire post on this);

— and, per one literature citation, radiation amounts being used by different mammogram machines at different facilities differ greatly (even though amounts are supposedly regulated by the U.S. FDA to avoid this problem), so some machines are giving women lower than average radiation amounts, while MOST are giving women HIGHER than average.

And know this from the ultimate experts: The International Atomic Energy Agency says in order to take the most accurate mammographic X-ray of the breast, necessary elements are required (such as compensating for dense breast tissue) and “[e]ach of these characteristics requires a relatively high X-ray exposure.”

So there you have it.

In other posts on dense breast tissue, I go into the shocking evidence exposing that mammograms — machines invented to screen for breast cancer — are most likely (and ironically) giving some women breast cancer through its radiation.

Blog at you soon, thanks for reading and helping to spread the word! (Please see the “share” links below).

Stay healthy,

Megan

Megan Smith, M.S.
Director, bOObs: The War on Women’s Breasts

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