re:Mammography Doses

[JDT4%NRSDE%DCPP@bangate.pge.com]

Sue...

You are not alone in your quest to find information regarding the doses you 
are being subjected to by the folks in the medical profession.  Being a man, I 
haven't had much experience (actually, zero) with mammograms, but as a fellow 
health physics professional, I routinely ask the technicians about the dose 
they are administering whenever I am in the dentist's chair or on the doctor's 
x-ray table.  In every instance, I did not receive an answer that made sense 
in the vernacular I use.  As a dosimetrist, I have often thought I should 
simply take a TLD with me to measure the dose, but have yet to do so.  Nor 
have I posed my questions to the radiologists. 

I suspect that perhaps the technicians who actually perform the shots are not 
fully aware of the dose they deliver in terms of millirem, but rather are 
simply using the devices in accordance with published guidelines and 
procedures that are designed to produce the desired results on film.  This is 
not to suggest that they (the technicians) don't know what they are doing, 
just that perhaps we don't share a common language. 

Jack Topper