Dear Health Care Industry, Please stop making us radioactive. Love, the Health Care Industry?

The LA Times gave the Image Wisely Campaign some inches last week.

The Image Wisely campaign is mostly "inside baseball", with its aims being to get the health care industry itself to "...stop the overuse of medical radiation on patients." Yes, this is a bunch of radiologists who are standing up to protest the overuse of their services.

However, this is just the latest part of a growing movement to acknowledge the potential harms of some kinds of screening, including mammograms. The basic idea is that doctors are overusing radioactive imaging to the point that the cumulative RADs a patient might be exposed to - just by getting all the preventative screening that is recommended - might actually cause cancer.

This is the basis of the whole "GET A MAMMOGRAM/DON'T GET A MAMMOGRAM" fight going on in the last two years. The base issue is this: no one seems to be able to get a definitive read on whether - statistically - the number of lives saved by mammograms is greater than the number of lives lost due to cancer caused by overexposure to radiation by mammograms.

Yes, you can put this on your ongoing "say what?!?" list.