Although this NYT article asks the general public to get tested for breast cancer only after 50 instead of the general guideline of 40, I think there’s enough evidence to show that mammograms do more harm than good and women should just stop getting tested altogether.
While the larger medical community would have you believe that mammograms are harmless- the very fact that they use ionizing radiation to show whether there are any tumors in women’s breasts is harmful. If you had the screening every year, imagine the irreparable harm this exacts on the body, in fact increasing the chances of the very thing you are trying to avoid.
In a Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of the mammographically detected tumors weren’t tumors at all. These “false positives” aren’t just financial and emotional strains, they may also lead to many unnecessary and invasive biopsies. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of all positive mammograms do not, upon biopsy, show any presence of cancer. My cousin (45) and my aunt (70) both had false positives but the emotional strain (test after test) is what is really harmful.