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
The mammogram is a ‘low energy’ x-ray, which means everything has to be a lot closer for it to work. In the case of a mammogram you are looking for denser tissues which are pretty hard to pick up on an x-ray. If you look at a chest film you can make out the heart but not a huge amount of intricate detail of the heart, you need more advanced imaging for that. The heart is a nice dense muscle, a mammogram is looking for tiny dense tissue patches.
I am not in love with mammograms as a diagnostic test. Statistically they have an alarming rate of false positives and false negatives. I think they removed the yearly mammogram requirement unless you are in a risky group because women would get a normal mammogram (false negative or not) and feel ‘safe’ for the next year. Well, that is a problem because you may start developing cancer a month after your mammogram and unless you are doing really close self-examinations you wont detect that new cancer for 11 months. There are cancer screening blood tests that I think are better, they can detect the possibility of any cancer. If that pops abnormal then go looking with radiation. That is how they treat my mother now, a 5-year (stage 2 b) breast cancer survivor.
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