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Each mammogram costs $125 on average, noted Dr Jennifer Ashton, CBS' in-house physician. She recited statistics to demonstrate how mammography is more suitable for older women. For low-risk women in their sixties, one lethal tumor is found and treated for every 377 mammograms, which works out at $47K per life saved; in their fifties the ratio is 1-in-1,339 or $167K; for fortysomethings it is 1-in-1,904 or $238K--without even counting the cost of the follow-up biopsies to discount false positives. Then Dr Ashton undercut her reporting with an unbelievable anecdote: "As a doctor who has many young women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer by a screening mammogram I think I am going to have a hard time recommending that they do not get screened."
Many? How many? For the sake of argument, let us say that Ashton's many means two dozen fortysomething patients. To have treated that many, she would have had to have prescribed mammography for more than 45,000 women in their forties--which would make her practice enormous, bigger than even Susan Love's. Far too big for her to find the time for a sideline as doctor on television too.
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