Breast self-exams have long been recommended as a simple way for women to keep track of anything unusual in their breasts. Now, after studies have found that such exams do not reduce breast cancer death rates, and actually increase the rate of unnecessary biopsies, many experts are recommending a more relaxed approach known as “breast awareness.”
Breast awareness is really self-explanatory. It means women should regularly check their breasts for changes, but can do so in a way that feels natural for them. In other words, you don’t have to do it on the same day each month, or using any particular pattern.
Simply be aware of what’s normal for you so you can recognize anything out of the ordinary.
What should you keep an eye out for?
- A new lump or hard knot found in your breast or armpit.
- Dimpling, puckering or indention in your breast or nipple.
- Change in the size, shape or symmetry of your breast.
- Swelling or thickening of the breast.
- Redness or scaliness of the nipple or breast skin.
- Nipple discharge, especially any that is bloody, clear and sticky, dark or occurs without squeezing your nipple.
- Changes in your nipple, such as tenderness, pain, turning or drawing inward, or pointing in a new direction.
- Any suspicious changes in your breasts.
The benefits of mammograms are highly controversial, while the risks are well established. Numerous studies have found that:
- Widespread screening is unjustified.
- Many false positives can lead to expensive repeat screenings and can sometimes result in unnecessary invasive procedures including biopsies and surgeries. Biopsies are being found to be not as safe as previously thought.
- Fear of just thinking about breast cancer can lead to other illnesses in your body; meaning a false positive mammogram, an unnecessary biopsy can be very damaging to your health.
- We all have heard of the unnecessary mastectomies that have occurred from false positives.
- Mammograms expose your body to radiation that can be 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray, which poses risks of cancer. Mammography also compresses your breasts tightly, and often painfully, which could lead to a lethal spread of cancerous cells, should they exist.
Safe screening methods do exist but you’re not likely to hear about them from your general practitioner as they are afraid of being sued by a woman who develops breast cancer and wasn’t told to get a mammogram. This attitude is dangerous to your health!
Thermographic breast screening is brilliantly simple. It measures the radiation of infrared heat from your body and translates this information into anatomical images. Your normal blood circulation is under the control of your autonomic nervous system, which governs your body functions.
To screen for breast cancer, in a rather cool room, we can see your autonomic nervous system reduce the amount of blood going to your breast, as a temperature-regulating measure. However, the pool of blood and primitive blood vessels that cancer cells create is not under autonomic control and is unaffected by the cool air. It will therefore stand out clearly on the thermographic image as a "hot spot."
Thermography uses no mechanical pressure or ionizing radiation, and can detect signs of breast cancer years earlier than either mammography or a physical exam.
Mammography cannot detect a tumor until after it has been growing for years and reaches a certain size. Thermography is able to detect the possibility of breast cancer much earlier, because it can image the early stages of angiogenesis (the formation of a direct supply of blood to cancer cells, which is a necessary step before they can grow into tumors of size).This combined with our knowledge of the various causes of disorders in the breast, such as a bad tooth, can detect any disorders earlier than mammogram and get at the underlying causes that can be corrected.
Please call us for an appointment on the newest high definition camera and quit playing the scare game.
