The Dirty Truth About Mammograms, Breast Cancer Myths & Truths | Dr. Jenn Simmons

July 30, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Dr. Jenn Simmons was a fellowship-trained breast surgeon, the first in Philadelphia, and she had spent two decades telling women exactly what she was trained to tell them: get your mammogram, follow the protocol, trust the standard of care. Then at 46, she became the patient. Sitting in a colleague’s office, hearing that she needed surgery, chemo, and radiation, she couldn’t quiet a voice that said there’s something more — go find it. She didn’t know what that meant. She was the system. But she went looking anyway, and what she found led her to walk away from surgery entirely and build a different model of breast cancer screening and prevention.

Why mammograms don’t do what we think they do

Simmons is direct: mammograms do not save lives. She points to large-scale trials — the Swedish trials involving 600,000 women, the Canadian breast cancer screening study of 90,000 women aged 40 to 59 — that show the same number of women die of breast cancer regardless of whether they are screened with mammography. The only difference is that the screened group is diagnosed with 20 to 30 percent more breast cancers. These are cancers that would never have become clinically relevant. Autopsy studies, she notes, show that one in five 30-year-old women already have breast cancer cells in their breasts — cells that never progress to disease.

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What you'll learn

1 (03:04) **Dr. Jenn Simmons’ Origin Story** - The guest’s personal and family history with breast cancer, and how it led her to become a surgeon and then a functional medicine advocate.
2 (08:58) **The Cancer Diagnosis That Changed Everything** - How hearing her own diagnosis broke the conventional mold and sent her looking for root causes.
3 (16:00) **Discovering Functional Medicine** - Dr. Simmons describes her journey from conventional training to finding the real causes of disease.
4 (21:11) **The Moment She Resigned from Surgery** - A patient encounter that forced her to walk away from the scalpel and change the conversation.
5 (25:50) **The Dirty Truth About Mammograms** - Why mammograms don’t save lives and what the data actually shows.
6 (32:32) **The Harm of Overtreatment** - How treating non-lethal cancers creates more damage than the disease itself.
7 (38:27) **Radiation as a Carcinogen** - The overlooked danger of the mammogram itself.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Dr. Jenn Simmons — former fellowship-trained breast surgeon, functional medicine physician, and founder of Perfection Imaging — joins Dr. Will Cole in New York for one of the most important conversations about women's health this podcast has ever had. She shares the family loss that launched her career, her own cancer diagnosis at 46 that led her to functional medicine, and why she walked away from a surgical career to build something entirely different. She makes a clear-eyed, evidence-backed case against mammograms as a standard screening tool — citing multiple large-scale clinical trials — and introduces two safe, effective alternatives: the ARIA tears test and QT sound wave imaging. She also addresses the BRCA genetic conversation, DCIS overtreatment, and why breast cancer must be understood as a metabolic, environmental, and mitochondrial disease. For all links mentioned in this episode, visit www.drwillcole.com/podcast.

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