Why isn't there a female Viagra? Well, there was. It didn't work, it never worked, and yet it got approved anyway because the Obama administration didn't want to look sexist. Science and health care costs did not matter when it came to perception.

That is the only reason screening mammograms have been dropped from age 50 to age 40. With that recommendation, health care is going to get more expensive because with government controlling it, and instituting a 'defensive medicine' and 'teach to the protocol' environment, every woman is going to be told to get one.

Will it save a few? Perhaps, but if you are in the 'if it can save even one life' camp please drive your car no faster than 5 MPH to my office and complain, because 10,000X as many people will be killed in car accidents driving fast.

The new recommendations replace old ones that said to get them every two years starting at age 50, and the political squeeze is brushed aside with the claim that the new screening will 'reduce mortality' by 19%. Except that is not what their own data say. The data include so many women who never got them at all until they are symptomatic that it is statistical misadventure if this was an effort by amateurs.

Yet this group is not an amateur effort, they know exactly what is in the numbers. The data show that earlier screenings create over-diagnosis and a lot of unnecessary treatments. With no drop in actual mortality that didn't occur outside women who only went to a doctor when it was too late.

This is only telling doctors to run tests they know aren't helping for women who already go to the doctor. It isn't helping vulnerable populations who are on Obamacare and can't get a doctor's appointment, because they are not going every year anyway. 

Yet all women will be told they need to get them twice as often, which is not really saving the women getting them based on this new protocol because, again, most mortality happens when cancer is not detected at all until it is too late. It is rare that a 40-old-woman is asymptomatic and dies from it in a year - and it is only deemed rare because we want to believe someone who says they were asymptomatic, whereas doctors suspect that is not true.