In this episode of Keeping Abreast, Dr. Jenn Simmons sits down with Ivy Harris, a homeschool mom of four, researcher, and soon-to-be certified homeopath behind the blog Done with Diligence, for part one of a two-part conversation on the hidden risks of mammograms and breast cancer screening. Ivy is not a doctor. She's a mom who decided she wasn't going to walk into her first mammogram without doing her own homework first, and what she found is the reason this episode exists.
It started with one post, Ivy broke down what she'd learned about mammograms into five parts, shared it, and watched it split her audience in half, with some women thanking her and others telling her she was going to get people killed. Dr. Jenn picks up exactly where Ivy left off and does the math no one does at check-in: 40 million screening mammograms a year, and by the numbers in the study Ivy found, the radiation alone works out to tens of thousands of cancers and over a thousand deaths a year.
This is the episode you'll want to send to every woman who's ever been told a mammogram is simply safe, simply necessary, and not worth questioning.
What You'll Learn
The naming decision behind "mammogram" that Dr. Jenn says was never an accident
Ionizing radiation is a classified carcinogen, and why radiologists won't apply that logic to their own test
The cross-country flight radiation comparison doctors use to reassure you, and why it doesn't hold up
How breast density and size can mean 10x more radiation for one woman than another in the same mammogram
Why younger breast tissue takes more damage from radiation as screening age keeps getting pushed lower
Overdiagnosis: the NIH's own number is as high as 1 in 2 women screened
Why DCIS, diagnosed in 90,000 women a year, has no physical route to become life-threatening breast cancer
How standard DCIS treatment can raise heart failure and fracture risk higher than the diagnosis itself
False positives and the 80% benign biopsy rate hiding behind every mammogram callback
What a 2026 American College of Physicians paper found on mammograms and breast cancer mortality, at every age
Why decades of mammography have increased mastectomies by 20%, the opposite of what screening promised
Lead time bias: how a screening test can look life-saving on paper without changing when anyone actually dies
The UK surgeon forced to resign for telling women the truth about mammogram screening
Episode Timeline: 00:00 Introducing Ivy Harris and Done with Diligence 02:27 Why Ivy researched mammogram safety before her first screening 03:00 Going past the rumors to the actual breast cancer research 04:13 Her viral mammogram post and the backlash that followed 05:32 Standing firm on breast cancer screening controversy 07:39 Radiation risks: why a mammogram is a breast x-ray 09:12 The studies linking mammogram radiation to breast cancer 11:14 How radiation damages younger breast tissue 13:36 The math: 40 million mammograms and radiation-induced cancer deaths 17:59 Overdiagnosis and unnecessary breast cancer treatment 26:14 The train analogy for mammogram overdiagnosis 28:12 How breast cancer actually progresses versus the screening myth 32:29 The real harm of overdiagnosis and overtreatment 34:54 Why mammograms don't reduce all-cause breast cancer mortality 50:15 Lead time bias and misleading screening survival statistics 52:04 Michael Baum, saving breasts, and a Part 2 preview
Resources Mentioned: American College of Physicians, Annals of Internal Medicine, April 2026: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-3424
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