Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

As 2024 winds down, we acknowledge that we're

facing a lot of unknowns in 2025. This podcast started in a moment of extreme uncertainty in March of

2020. Since then, we've worked to bring context, evidence, and personal stories to critical

public health issues, and we remain committed to being

your regular dose of informed discussion. Thank you for listening, for writing to us, and for being

with us on this journey. We're taking a much-needed break for the holidays, and we'll be back with

new episodes in January. As always, please keep sending your ideas and questions to public health question

at jh.edu, and we'll see you in 2025. Today, Dr. Otis Brawley, a Johns Hopkins-Bloomberg

distinguished professor and epidemiologist, returns to the podcast. He talks with Stephanie

Desmond about the ins and outs of mammography and breast

cancer, including the biggest question of them all, do mammograms save lives? Let's listen.

Otis Brawley, thanks so much for returning to the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. So I want to

start with a big question.

Do mammograms save lives?

That is a very good question.

And to answer it, I have to go back to a Jesuit philosopher who taught me in high school who said, you should always tell people what you know, what you don't know, and what you believe.

In the case of mammograms, we have 12 studies that show that mammograms save lives when done in women age 50 to 75. We know that,

...