Breast surgeon warns against mammography: “It doesn’t save lives, but primarily creates more patients”

American breast surgeon and breast cancer specialist Jennifer Simmons fundamentally questions the traditional mammography screening method. In an extensive interview with Del Bigtree of The HighWire, she explains that, in her opinion, the current screening system does not make women healthier, but rather leads to an increasing number of women becoming breast cancer patients.

Simmons is not only speaking as a doctor. Breast cancer has run in her own family for generations, and she herself was diagnosed at the age of 46. She was the first board-certified breast surgeon with a fellowship in Philadelphia and operated on breast cancer patients for many years. It was only her own illness, she says, that led her to fundamentally question the system in which she had long worked.

A breast surgeon begins to question her own field

The crucial question for Simmons was: Does the established system of early detection and subsequent treatment actually work? Her answer is: No.

Not because breast cancer isn’t a serious illness. It most certainly is. Rather, Simmons argues that the way women are examined and subsequently treated, in her estimation, can cause more harm than is generally assumed.

What the data shows, according to Simmons

Simmons cites, among others, a large Cochrane review to justify her criticism, in which data from more than 600,000 women from mammography screening studies were evaluated.

According to their presentation, the number of women who die from breast cancer differs only slightly between women with and without screening.

Simmons explains one important statistical effect with the so-called lead-time bias.

Let’s assume a woman develops a tumour at age 60. It is detected at this age through a mammogram. Without screening, she might not have discovered the tumour until age 65. If the woman dies at age 70 in both cases, the statistical outcomes are completely different.

With screening, she apparently lived with the cancer diagnosis for ten years. Without screening, it was only five years.

The statistical “survival time” has thus doubled – even though the woman didn’t live a single day longer. The statistics look better. However, the actual time of death remains unmodified.

Overdiagnosis: How healthy people can become patients

Simmons finds the phenomenon of overdiagnosis even more problematic.

She refers to autopsy examinations of women who died for completely different reasons – such as accidents, suicide, or overdoses. In these cases, microscopic evidence of cancer cells or corresponding changes in breast tissue was found in approximately one in five women.

These women were not diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime and did not die from it.

The problem: According to Simmons, mammography cannot reliably distinguish which detected modifications become dangerous and which would have remained inconspicuous throughout a person’s life.

She argues that 20 to 50 percent of cancers detected through screening may be clinically irrelevant – modifications that would never have affected the life of the woman concerned.

Based on approximately four million women in the US who are considered breast cancer survivors, Simmons estimates that at least 1.3 million women may have been treated unnecessarily.

These treatments are by no means harmless. Simmons points to possible consequences such as cardiovascular diseases, neurological problems, osteoporosis, and erotic dysfunction. In addition, there are significant psychological and financial burdens.

BRCA: Cancer gene or protective mechanism?

Simmons also criticizes the public perception of the BRCA gene.

The topic became known to a wider audience through Angelina Jolie, among others, who opted for a preventative mastectomy due to her genetic risk.

Simmons emphasizes that BRCA is not simply a “cancer gene.” In fact, it is a tumour suppressor gene that plays an important role in repairing damaged DNA.

According to Simmons, the lifetime risk for women with a BRCA mutation of developing breast cancer was approximately 35% about 60 years ago. Today, the risk is estimated to be as high as 87%.

Since the human gene has not fundamentally modified in this short time, Simmons sees the cause of the increase primarily in environmental and lifestyle factors.

She also criticizes a possible contradiction within the preventive care system.

Women with BRCA mutations are monitored particularly closely due to their increased risk and are sometimes examined regularly from a young age. However, mammograms use X-rays. Women with impaired DNA repair mechanisms, in particular, would be repeatedly exposed to radiation to which their bodies may be especially sensitive.

An alternative without compression and X-rays

However, Simmons is not calling for all breast cancer screenings to simply be stopped.

Instead, she advocates for a fundamentally different approach: The focus should be more on preventing breast cancer before it develops, rather than searching for existing tumours as early as possible.

Through her company PerfeQTion Imaging, Simmons works with a technology called QT Imaging. This procedure uses sound waves to create a three-dimensional image of breast tissue in a warm water bath. It does not require the breast compression typical of mammography and does not use ionizing radiation. The technology received FDA approval in 2023.

Furthermore, her team is investigating inflammatory markers in tear fluid. These should provide clues as to whether a person currently has an increased risk of developing breast cancer – possibly long before anything is detectable in an imaging study.

According to Simmons’ approach, people at increased risk could then make targeted transformations to their lifestyle instead of waiting for a tumour to be discovered during an examination.

Criticism of “Pink October”

In conclusion, Simmons also directs her criticism at the commercial machinery surrounding Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October and the associated “Pink” campaign.

In her view, many organizations that sell pink products or support related campaigns are simultaneously promoting a system that may do more harm than good to women.

Simmons recommends that women instead focus more on fundamental factors for their health: sufficient sleep, nutrition, hydration, exercise, and their personal living environment. Unnecessary exposure to pollutants should be avoided as much as possible.

In her opinion, these factors could make a demonstrable difference. She claims, however, that annual mammograms offer no corresponding benefit in terms of extending lifespan.

Simmons thus directly contradicts what women have been told about breast cancer screening for decades. She cites scientific data on overdiagnosis, lead-time bias, and the potential harm of treatments, and poses a fundamental question: If early detection uncovers more and more cancers and extends statistical survival time, but does not correspondingly prevent women from dying – how great is its actual benefit?

 

yogaesoteric
October 21, 2026