Mammo Mia!

A mammogram can be an unsettling experience, says a 'sufferer' who can't understand why medical research keeps contradicting itself every few years

Mammo Mia!

A mammogram can be an unsettling experience, says a 'sufferer' who can't understand why medical research keeps contradicting itself every few years

If you are a 50-year-old woman with an overzealous gynaecologist, you are going to gnash your teeth when you hear of the latest medical guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force.

You know those biennial mammograms she made you go through for the past 10 years? Well, you needn't have got them done.

In fact, now is when you should start, and you have to keep going till you're in your mid-seventies. Ten mammograms in your lifetime are what the task force now recommends.

In its usual maddening way, medical research keeps contradicting itself every few years.

If you're a 50-year-old man, of course you're wondering what the fuss is all about. It's just a chest X-ray, right? With one small difference, mister or rather, two.

For the exclusive benefit of ignorant male readers I shall now describe this devilish procedure, sparing no detail, however slight. A mammogram involves naked breasts, but it's not quite the stuff of heterosexual male fantasy.
Put yourself in a woman's shoes for a moment. Imagine you have breasts (some of you tubby ones already do).
What you do is place them one at a time on a smooth, horizontal, metal plate and then hear the lab assistant ask you politely if she can start.

"Start" means bringing down another flat metal object that rightly belongs in a printing press, and squashing said breast to the thickness of a tandoori roti and the square kilometre area of, approximately, Asia.

You've barely caught your breath when the cross-section is measured yet again, this time with two vertical plates.

You'll consider yourself lucky if your breasts are floppy like a bunny rabbit's ears, for the pain would be considerably reduced.

But if they are the "proud young breasts" that all Mills and Boon heroines sport, you won't be doing a mammogram again in a hurry, believe me.

I got my first and only mammogram done when my gyno mistook a hardened duct for a cyst.u00a0 Murmurs about the dangers of over-screening began about that time.

I wonder why it took so long to discover that too many mammograms entail the risk of cancer frequent doses of radiation can hardly be beneficial. But women in the US have been getting screened every year after they turn 40.

We in India are more lackadaisical about such things as annual medical check-ups, which might be not such a bad thing, after all.

Those in the high-risk category (with family history of breast cancer, for instance) must obviously get screened regularly, but the rest of us need not get paranoid let's put it that way.

Biology has given women more than their fair share of pain. Whaddya say, mister? You poor thing, you have to shave every day, don't you? Aww.

But just imagine if you had to get your jewels squeezed to check for prostate cancer. Aren't you the lucky one?