Mammography is a huge money maker and quite possibly an influence in the rising cancer rates. From World Wire:

Routine mammography delivers an unrecognized high dose of radiation, warn Drs. Epstein and Bertell. If a woman follows the current guidelines for premenopausal screening, over a 10 year period she would receive a total dosage of about 5 rads. This approximates the level of exposure to radiation of a Japanese woman one mile from the epicenter of atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

“Mammography is a striking paradigm of the capture of unsuspecting women by run-away powerful technological and global pharmaceutical industries, with the complicity of the cancer establishment, particularly the ACS, and the rollover mainstream media," they warn.

Drs. Epstein and Bertell emphasize, "Promotion of the multibillion dollar mammography screening industry has also become a diversionary flag around which legislators and women's product corporations can rally, protesting how much they care about women, while studiously avoiding any reference to avoidable risks of breast cancer.

Your best defense is to perform routine self breast exams each month, get annual breast exams from a professional, and spread out those mammagrams over a longer period of time (get fewer of them).