A Safer and More Effective Way to Detect Breast Cancer Earlier
Written by Julien Prosnier, integrative medicine therapist,
Website: thenaturalhealth.expert
Imagine if we had the technology to offer a safer alternative to mammograms that didn’t use radiation, was far less expensive and significantly more comfortable.
Even better, what if this technology could detect changes in the breast that were likely to lead to breast cancer five to eight years before they could be seen on a mammogram? It would revolutionise breast cancer prevention and treatment. Every doctor would recommend it for female patients, starting in their twenties.
We'll stop imagining because this exact technology has existed for over 40 years. Breast thermography may well be one of the best-kept secrets in medicine today. And what you don’t know about it could put you and women you love at a higher risk of undetected breast cancer.
How it Works?
Breast thermography is basically a digital infrared photograph. Infrared means it measures heat. Think about the thermometer you use at home if you think someone is sick. You take their temperature and if it is elevated, you know that the person’s immune system is kicking into overdrive because something is wrong inside. In the same way, thermal imaging detects if the temperature on the surface of your breast indicates abnormalities due to inflammation and/or
increased blood flow. Increased heat patterns can indicate a pre-cancerous condition or tumour growth.
Ideally, this non-invasive procedure is performed multiple times over a woman’s lifetime, so thermal “fingerprints” can be viewed over a long period. When “hot spots” are identified, additional screening measures can be used to confirm or disprove the presence of cancer.
But does it work?
Thermography isn’t new. In fact, it was approved in the USA by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) as a screening procedure for cancer way back in 1982. Scientific proof that thermography is not only effective at detecting breast cancer, but also indicates cancer risk, has been piling up ever since.
According to a 2008 study performed at New York Presbyterian Hospital Cornell, thermograms correctly identified 58 out of 60 malignancies, as compared to biopsy. This means the thermograms had an impressive 97% sensitivity.
For comparison, mammograms only have an 80% sensitivity, since 20% of
breast cancers can’t even be seen on a mammogram.
But that’s not all.
Advantages of breast thermography include:
-Painless
-No breast pressure or compression
-No harmful radiation
-Early, more accurate detection
-No physical contact with technicians
-Risk-free
The Radiation Risk
The painful irony with the mammograms doctors routinely coerce millions of women into every year is they actually increase their patients’ likelihood of developing cancer.
Think about it. Mammograms require a dose of radiation to produce images. In fact, a typical mammogram schedule takes four films off each breast each year. That may not sound like much, but it results in 1 rad (radiation absorbed dose) of exposure annually, which is approximately 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray.
How bad is that?
Each 1 rad of exposure increases your risk of developing breast cancer by about 1%. That means in just a decade’s worth of annual screening, you get a cumulative 10% increased risk of cancer. Mammograms are supposed to catch cancer, not cause it. But since mammographic screening was introduced in 1983 in the USA, the incidence of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a type of breast cancer which represents 12% of all breast cancer cases, has skyrocketed by 328%. Compounding the problem is the painful compression of breast tissue between glass slides during the mammogram which researchers believe may actually cause any existing cancer cells to metastasise out of your
breast tissue and spread through the rest of your body.
What else should you know about mammograms?
Another one of mammography’s flaws is the false positive rate. The exact numbers vary from study to study, but as an example, in one Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of the mammographically detected tumours weren’t tumours at all.
As a result, millions of women who test positive every year are unnecessarily frightened and have
to undergo further screenings, such as surgery for a biopsy. Even the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in the USA reported that adding an annual mammogram to a careful physical examination of the breasts offers zero improvement to breast-cancer survival rates over getting the physical examination alone. If saving your life is the real measuring stick, mammograms serve no useful function.
The Bottom Line
Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer among women, and the most common cause of cancer death. What we’re doing is clearly not effective. If you want the earliest possible indication of potential problems in your breast health, early results provided by a thermogram can give you the opportunity to recognise the warning signs of breast cancer before it’s too late.
Where to go?
Resources:
Arora N, et al. Effectiveness of a noninvasive digital
infrared thermal imaging system in the detection of
breast cancer. American Journal of Surgery. 2008
Oct;196 (4):523-6
Group Health Cooperative Center for Health
Studies. Accuracy Of Diagnostic Mammograms
Varies By Radiologist, Study Finds. ScienceDaily.
2007 Dec 12.
Miller AB, et al. Canadian National Breast Screening
Study-2: 13-year results of a randomized trial in
women aged 50-59 years. Journal of the National
Cancer Institute. 2000 Sep 20;92(18):1490-9