Myth: “Mammograms are low-dose radiation”

Hello bOObs Blogettes and HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

I decided to repost this important blog so that the new people joining us might have a chance to learn from it. Suffice to say this: The amount of radiation in a mammogram is much, much higher than the medical establishment is letting on.

This is a LONG story with many working pieces, so I’ll write about it over several Blogs, but I’ll give you one takeaway today: 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 baloney. 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 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, 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. 

I’ll have to peel away the onion layers on different reasons for why this is so in upcoming blogs, 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 requires higher radiation to differentiate between it 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’ll do an entire post on this later);

— and 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: The International Atomic Energy Agency says on its website that due to the necessary elements required for taking the most accurate mammographic X-ray of the breast, “[e]ach of these characteristics requires a relatively high X-ray exposure.”

So there you have it.

In a future post, I will 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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