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examined and have chest radiography performed. If pneumothorax is confirmed the patient should be referred to a respiratory physician. Such patients tend not to have primary lung disease and so their case will be amenable to observation or simple aspiration of the pneumothorax, which can often be performed as an outpatient procedure, avoiding the trauma of chest drainage. When the pneumothoraces in our series were managed by general physicians chest drainage was used, which generally amounts to overtreatment in such cases. Clinicians should be aware that pneumothorax is an accepted but rare complication of fine needle aspiration of lumps in the breast. We thank the surgeons concerned for allowing us to report these cases.