The Mammogram Secret Women Are NEVER Told

As a holistic doctor, I always treat my patients as individuals.

So I have to admit – the way we do health screenings in this country never made much sense to me.

We have millions of people – all with different risk profiles – put through the same one-size-fits-all approach.

Case in point?

Countless women are practically ordered by their doctors to get a mammogram every year.

They’re told it’s a matter of life and death – even if they’re at very low risk for cancer.

Now, a new study is exposing a dirty little secret about mammograms – more screening doesn’t always equal better protection.

And the best way to keep some women safe may be fewer mammograms.

I’ve written about mammograms before – and how they’ve never been as harmless as mainstream medicine wants us to believe.

Mammograms expose sensitive breast tissue to massive amounts of ionizing radiation, which is known to cause cancer.

But we could mitigate a lot of the risk to women by only giving mammograms when absolutely necessary.

Now, a large new study is showing that we can personalize our approach to mammograms for women without losing our ability to detect cancer early.

The long-awaited WISDOM (Women Informed to Screen Depending on Measures of Risk) study was just published in JAMA, and it’s turning a lot of the conventional thinking on mammograms on its head.

Researchers tracked 28,000 women and found that adjusting screening schedules based on women’s risk profiles did not lead to worse outcomes.

High-risk women could be screened more frequently, and low-risk women could get far fewer mammograms – and cancer was not being missed.

This was a major study published in one of the world’s leading medical journals – and it should be the nail in the coffin for the one-size-fits-all approach to mammograms.

Of course, mainstream medicine doesn’t change easily.

The radiology community threw a tantrum over this research – basically arguing that we shouldn’t make any changes.

And, honestly, their reaction was embarrassing. Can you imagine actually arguing against personalized medicine?

But with billions of dollars at stake in the mammography market, you can bet some people are going to fight tooth-and-nail against less frequent screening.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. If you’re at low risk for breast cancer, talk to your doctor about whether you can get screened less often.

If your doctor is resistant to even having the conversation, do yourself a favor and get a second opinion.

View Sources

Esserman, L. J., Fiscalini, A. S., Naeim, et. al. (2025). Risk-based vs annual breast cancer screening: The WISDOM randomized clinical trial. JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2025.24784

Park, A. (2025, December). A new study challenges the way we screen for breast cancer. TIME. https://time.com/7340333/breast-cancer-screening-annual-mammograms-wisdom-study/