Mammograms were not the recommended routine for any healthy woman under 40. She was 36. Nor did she fit any of the risk categories that trigger yearly exams for women younger than 40.

My daughter, Cheryl Arnold, discovered her tumor, literally by accident.

She was flying home after a visit with her mother and me when a stewardess dropped a bag from an overhead bin. It hit her on her chest, leaving a bruise that did not heal with time.

Even after a needle aspiration biopsy and an ultrasound, the lump was diagnosed as a blood clot. If her husband, Aric, had not been coming home from Egypt on leave, she may not have had the mammogram.

"I knew Aric wasn't going to be satisfied until we had exhausted every possible test," she told me. "I did it, to get him off my back."

The cancer was advanced and aggressive. So were the treatments. After radiation, three surgeries, more radiation, chemotherapy and rest, she is healthy and thankful to God for her "accident" and for a husband who would not accept a guess as an answer.

I thought of her first when I heard of the recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force last week. I figured that she would make the case for early screenings. I figured wrong.

"I've been reading a lot," she told me "I tend to believe the new guidelines."

The USPSTF is recommending that women under 50 avoid "routine" mammograms and that women over 50 have them only every other year.

The key word is "routine." USPSTF does not oppose mammograms for younger women. But it advises women to consult their physicians first, rather than scheduling them routinely.

The guidelines offer no new recommendations for women who have risk factors such as family history or exposure to cancer-causing agents.

The recommendations have ignited a firestorm of controversy. Opponents of health- care reform cite the new guidelines as exhibit A in their argument that health reform equals rationing. Death panels have become breast panels.

But this can't be dismissed as a political ploy. The American Cancer Society and other respected authorities have disparaged the report as a flawed interpretation of research that is at least a decade old.

The controversy is older than that. The National Women's Health Network lobbied effectively in Congress to get Medicare coverage of routine mammograms in the late 1980s.

But the Women's Health Network later reversed course after studies failed to demonstrate the benefits of early mammogram screenings. It opposed routine screening for premenopausal women in a 1993 position paper.

Cancer-care advocates are split. In 2006, the Doctor Susan Love Research Foundation found that "screening is still our best tool. . . . We need to take advantage of it while working very hard to find something better."

The National Breast Cancer Coalition in 2003 said that there is "insufficient evidence to recommend for or against" early screening. The Breast Cancer Action group issued a statement in 2004 saying that "the benefit for premenopausal women is unproven."

The Center for Medical Consumers still favored early screening. But it agreed in 2005 that the effect of early testing on cancer mortality "at best appears minimal."

I still didn't know who is right.

So, I turned to the one person I know whose life was saved in part by an early mammogram screening.

"It's not fair to young women to let them believe that this will save a lot of lives," Cheryl said. "There are real problems with false positives that lead people to get biopsies and surgeries when its not needed."

But she insisted on being tested for a gene that would identify her two daughters, aged 11 and 20, as having a high risk for inflammatory breast cancer.

"It was negative," she said. "But they will have mammograms when they're 36 because my cancer is a risk factor for them.

"That's where early screening makes sense."

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