I’ve never had a mammogram so I actually don’t know how it works. Only heard the jokes about how they squish your breasts and that it hurts. We were talking about how men can have breast cancer so why don’t they get mammograms? (Maybe they do). Then we laughed as we pretended to slip a tiny man boob into an imaginary mammogram machine (that I’ve never seen).
So I thought they can do X-rays and stuff. Why do they *have* to torture you to get the results. Did some sick doctor invent the machine, laughing the whole time about how evil and unnecessary it is? /s
Biology tag? Idk.
In: Biology
I’ve been a registered mammographer for over 30 years. There are many reasons we compress the tissue. 1)The thinner the tissue, the less radiation it takes to penetrate.
2) To hold the breast motionless in case the patient breathes or moves. Even the slightest motion or movement of the breast can blur structures we are trying to see.. in mammography we are looking for things often not bigger than grains of sand.
3) most importantly, simply the fewer layers of soft tissue we have to see through, the more accurate your exam is.
The way I explain it to my patients is to imagine that you are kneading bread and you loose your ring. Are you going to stare at the dough or are you going to spread it out so that you can locate your ring. In mammography, we are spreading out the tissue to locate the cancer.
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