“It is about our body, our own body!”: On the difficulty of telling dutch women under 50 that mammography is not for them

This article is concerned with the reasons why sometimes good arguments in health communication leaflets fail to convince the targeted audience. As an illustrative example it uses the age-dependent eligibility of women in the Netherlands to receive routine breast cancer screening examinations: according to Dutch regulations women under 50 are ineligible for them. The present qualitative study rests on and complements three experimental studies on the persuasiveness of mammography information leaflets; it uses interviews to elucidate reasons why the arguments in the health communication leaflets for the exclusion of women under 50 from routine mammographic screenings do not work.