Breast Cancer Screening
Get up to 5 to 10 Years Early Warning with Clinical Thermography.
Is there a safer, less invasive, and more accurate way than mammography of examining breasts for signs of cancer?
A nontoxic, highly accurate, and inexpensive form of diagnostic imaging does exist and has been used by progressive physicians in the U.S. and Europe since 1962. Called thermography, it's based on infrared heat emissions from targeted regions of the body.
Something is wrong with this person's right knee (photo on the left) and with the other person's left upper and mid back (photo on the right). The red and white areas are increased heat emanating from these areas.
The medical professional couldn't detect anything wrong with this person's left leg (photo on the left). But with thermography the problem was easily located - Phlebitis of the left lateral lower extremeity. The photo on the right shows the rear portion of the right lower leg with increased heat. Something is wrong there.As the body's cells go through their energy conversion processes, called metabolism, they emit heat. Thermography is able to register these heat emissions, display them on a computer monitor, and thereby provide a diagnostic window into the functional physiologic status of a given body area, such as the female breast.
At present, there are perhaps 1,000 thermography devices in the U.S. for providing this detailed, clinically valuable information. As far as we know, we are the only office to offer clinical thermography here in Southest Asia. For breast cancer, thermography offers a very early warning system, often able to pinpoint a cancer process five years or more before it would be detectable by mammography.
Most breast tumors have been growing slowly for up to 20 years before they are found by typical diagnostic techniques. Thermography can detect cancers when they are at a minute physical stage of development, when it is still relatively easy to halt and reverse the progression of the cancer.
More Breast-Friendly Than Mammography
The procedure is simple and non-invasive. The woman stands unclothed from the waste up and about 10 feet from the device; the imaging takes only a matter of minutes, as results are displayed instantaneously on the monitor; and generally the data can be rapidly interpreted with the assistance of sophisticated image analyzing software. No rays of any kind enter the patient's body; there is no pain or compressing of the breasts as in a mammogram. Thermography is thus a breast-friendly procedure, and its widespread use could save many women from the development of breast cancer and/or highly traumatic surgery and radiation treatments later.
Mammography has multiple drawbacks and many women are beginning to realize this despite the pressure of conventional radiologists to insist on more screenings at increasingly earlier ages.
Mammography is uncomfortable, at times even painful for women, as their breasts are held in a vise during the screening. Mammography is only 40% to 60% accurate for premenopausal women or for menopausal women taking synthetic hormones. It is also considerably inaccurate for women with large breasts. Mammography is at its best for postmenopausal women, for whom it has an 81% accuracy rate.
A serious drawback of mammography is the high incidence of "false negative" results. This means the test indicates there is no cancer in the breast when there actually is; unfortunately, the woman may discover the breast cancer in progress only later when the time for early intervention has already passed.
Further, according to The Lancet, of the 5% of mammograms that suggest further testing, up to 93% are false positives-i.e., follow-up biopsies indicate no cancer. Furthermore, in 90% of these "callbacks," the first readings were simply not clear because of dense, overlying breast tissue that interfered with the results. The Lancet concluded that for women over 40, "the benefit is marginal, the harm caused is substantial, and the costs incurred are enormous." The Lancet also stated, "We suggest that public funding for breast cancer screening in any age group is not justifiable."
Similarly, fibrocystic breast tissue can be mistaken for tumors and lead to unnecessary biopsies. Perhaps 25% to 30% of women have fibrocystic lumps in their breasts; conventional doctors, worrying about malpractice suits for failing to diagnose cancer, can construe every fibrocystic lump as cancerous and order a rash of biopsies. The biopsy itself is injurious to healthy breast tissue. Mammography is contraindicated for women with breast augmentation (silicone or saline implants). The trouble here is twofold: the implant obscures a fair amount of otherwise imaginable breast tissue and the mammography procedure itself can potentially damage the implants, producing leakage.
Perhaps most damning, mammography exposes the breast to damaging radiation. Based on 40 years of studying the effects of low-dose radiation on humans, John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., an authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation, estimates that 75% of breast cancer could be prevented by avoiding or minimizing exposure to the ionizing radiation from mammography, X rays, and other medical sources.
With its errors, false negatives, and radiation exposure, mammography is not an acceptable way of screening breasts; the only reason it's tolerated is that it is a major source of steady income for radiologists. They have come to covet mammography and want no competition from other approaches.
Meanwhile the incidence of breast cancer continues to rise. Currently, one in eight women will get the disease. It was one in twelve in 1971-when we began thermography imaging-and it is occurring in ever younger women. Once women start making demands on their physicians for a different imaging approach, thermography can become the preferred initial screening method. Then mammography will be used only as needed to pinpoint the precise location of breast tumors.
In contrast, thermography is 86% to 96% accurate for indicating cancer in premenopausal women. When there is a mistake with thermography, it is almost never a false negative, but rather a false positive. That means our interpretation of the thermography imaging led us to suspect a cancer process when in fact there was none. Further, while mammography tends to lose effectiveness with dense breast tissue, thermography works independently of varied tissue densities. For this reason, it is especially useful for screening younger women (who typically have denser breast tissue).
Breasts That Glow in Infrared
From the viewpoint of thermography, the body is like a walking beacon - we glow in infrared. The glow is based on heat emissions from our tissues as they convert (metabolize) food into energy and as the energy is picked up by the blood circulation. Our circulatory system acts as a giant radiator to distribute and equalize body heat derived from metabolism. The thermographic image shows us areas of diminished energy flow.
During a typical thermography session, the subject stands in front of the heat-sensitive thermography camera while the operator takes a set of computerized pictures of the body's internal heat patterns. The subject then places both hands in cold water as a "challenge" to the circulatory system.
This sudden exposure to cold causes healthy blood vessels to constrict as an adaptive response intended to conserve heat. Blood vessels associated with cancerous growths, however, lack a smooth muscle layer and therefore cannot constrict. When a second set of pictures is taken, any cancerous area of the breast will scan as higher in temperature than the surrounding tissue, due to the relatively greater amount of blood flow (hypervascularity) in the area.
In addition to hypervascularity of blood vessels, cancerous growths tend to give off more infrared energy. That's because cancer itself is by definition an uncontrolled growth; it can't use its energy as efficiently as other cells in the body. This lack of energy efficiency in a cancerous growth, added to the inflammation of surrounding tissues-a result of the body's natural immune reaction against a cancerous mass-helps to emphasize the difference in infrared energy between cancer cells and healthy cells and thereby to accurately pinpoint the tumor process. The inflammation itself, produced by breast tissue injury from the tumor, gives off excess heat.
The thermography diagnosis is then based on a comparison of the "pre-challenge" and "post-challenge" pictures, taken before and after the cold water treatment. We normally expect to see body temperature go down by about 0.25° C after the challenge to the system.
If it stays essentially the same or actually goes up-this means there is no cold water-induced constriction-then the "alarm bells" go off and we start suspecting cancer. Often with cancerous tissue, the blood flow increases as a result of the cold water challenge and the blood vessels in that area register thermographically as emitting more energy and a lighter image. Through thermography, we can tell if a blood vessel is unusually large, has a complex structure, or has a high degree of blood flow. If the energy flow pattern (vascularity) in one breast is higher than the other breast (usually by at least 1.5° C), this is a warning sign. Typically, five irregularities are screened for as indicators of a cancer process, but generally if even two of these are present, then we are about 96% certain there is cancer. At this point, mammography can be useful for refining the diagnosis and precisely indicating the location and size of the breast tumor.
Depending on the results of the thermography test, subjects are classified into the following categories, according to the system of interpretation developed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, in 1976. Specifically, these categories are:
How Clinical Thermography is used in Breast Cancer Screening
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