Thermography: The Safer, More Effective Alternative To Mammograms

Part of my mission in helping you to understand all you can and must do to most effectively prevent and treat cancer is emphasizing early detection. Simply put, the earlier cancer is detected, the better the odds are for a full and long-lasting recovery.

Today, I want to talk about one of the most effective ways women can detect breast cancer, as well as other types of cancer, early and safely using thermography. As I mentioned last time, thermography is a safe and effective alternative to mammograms. Today I will explain why this is so and why you absolutely must know about thermography in your fight to protect yourself from cancer.

What Is Thermography?

Thermography is the name given to a diagnostic technique that employs thermal (heat) imaging to allow health practitioners to get a clearer idea about what is taking place inside their patients’ bodies. Breast thermography is the name given to thermography when it is used to screen for signs of breast cancer, as well as for determining the overall health of the breast. Unlike mammograms, breast thermography is 100% safe, and is far more accurate in detecting signs of breast cancer than mammograms are. As I explained in Part 1 [Carlos – please link the underlined text to the first of my 2 mammogram articles. Thank you – Larry]of my article about the dangers of mammograms, mammograms fail to detect breast cancer 20 to 40 percent of the time. By contrast, breast thermography successfully detects breast cancer 90%, and has the added benefit of being able to do so up to 8 to 10 years earlier than mammography.

Research published in the American Journal of Radiology confirms how important breast thermography is in the fight against cancer. In addition to confirming thermography’s 90% accuracy rate, the Journal reported that breast thermography has a 90% specificity rate and a 99% sensitivity rate. No other screening method for breast cancer comes close to these rates. For example, the sensitivity rate for physical breast exams is only 18%, while for mammograms and MRIs it is 70 and 71% respectively.  Moreover, since 1982 breast thermography has also been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Despite all these facts, few physicians are even aware of the powerful, health-saving benefits thermography can provide, and fewer still ever tell their patients about it. This is a travesty of the highest order! And it exists largely because of the multiyear and multibillion dollar campaign by the American mammography industry to suppress pubic awareness of thermography. All for the sake of profit at the expense of public safety and well-being!

The following facts make it clear why I stress the importance of thermography to doctors and patients alike. I hope you will pay attention to what I am going to share with you next because it’s vitally important.

Cancer cells double every 90 days. That means it takes 90 days for a single cancer cell to turn into two cells, and approximately one full year before that single cancer cell grows to 16 cells. By the end of year two, if left unchecked, that single cancer cell will have grown to 256 cancer cells, forming a tumor that is .25 centimeters in size. Thermography can detect tumor cells that are even smaller than that—about the size of a single grain of rice. When tumors that small are detected, patients have nearly a 100 percent (99%) chance of long-term survival.

Now consider this: at best, mammography can only detect breast tumors that are 2.5 centimeters in size (about the size of a dime and 10 times the tumor size at the end of year two). This equates to tumors comprised of nearly 4.3 billion cancer cells, a number that will not occur until the end of the eight year after the first cancer cell took hold. Most times, however, mammograms fail to detect breast cancer tumors until they have grown to contain between 69 billion to over 1 trillion cancer cells! Meaning that it is not until the 9^th or 10^th year, or even later, that mammography will detect breast cancer. (The same is true if breast self-exams, too.) By then, the spread of cancer can often prove too much for conventional cancer treatments to reverse, and also more challenging for practitioners of alternative and integrative cancer care to treat.

Based on the above facts, doesn’t it make sense for all women over the age of 35 to replace their annual mammograms with annual thermography checkups instead? Of course it does!

How Thermography Works

Perhaps you are familiar with night vision goggles used by the military and police agencies. These goggles enable their wearers to spot people in the darkness by the heat signature of their bodies. Thermography works in much the same way. It employs a special infrared sensitive camera to digitally record images of the surface temperature of the body. This enables technicians trained in the use of thermography to detect variations in surface body temperature throughout, as well as the entire body. (As a result, thermography is also highly useful for detecting a wide range of other disease conditions, including prostate and other cancers, inflammatory breast disease, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorder, thyroid issues, hiatal hernias, and even early warning signs of heart disease and stroke!)

Abnormal variations in surface body temperature are biomarkers, or “fingerprints”, indicating the sign of tumors or other potential health problems. These temperature variations can be very subtle, but where they occur, it is highly likely that they are signs of a pathology in the breast. That’s because research has shown that the metabolic activity and vascular circulation in both pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues and the surrounding areas of the breast are almost higher, resulting in an increase in surface body temperature compared to that of normal, healthy breast tissue.

This rise in surface body temperature is also due to the way that cancer cells nourish themselves. As cancer cells and tumors grow, they require an ever-increasing supply of nutrients. In order to obtain these nutrients, tumors increase circulation to their cells by diverting nutrients through existing blood vessels, as well as by opening dormant blood vessels and creating new ones (a process called angiogenesis), all of which raises surface body temperature in the areas of the breast wherever blood vessels have been taken over by tumors. These temperature variations are among the very earliest signs that breast tissue has entered into a pre-cancerous or cancerous state. In fact, studies have shown that an abnormal thermography reading is the single most important indication of high risk for developing breast cancer, ten times as significant as a family history of cancer. Currently, only thermography is capable of detecting these temperature variations at their earliest stages.

Another major advantage of thermography is that it is noninvasive and quick, and free of the discomfort associated with mammograms. There is no compression, no direct contact with the body, and no harmful substances to be exposed to, let alone the cancer-causing radiation emitted by mammograms. Instead, all you have to do is allow your body to reach a steady temperature state that is compatible with the special temperature conditions of the thermography room. This usually takes no more than 15 minutes. After that, you will be positioned in front of the thermography camera so that all surfaces of your breasts, upper chest and underarms can be imaged. The images are captured in real time and then transmitted to a sophisticated computer for analysis. The computer allows your doctor to isolate differences in surface body temperature and vascularity. After the images are analyzed, they are graded using a strict standardized system based on five categories. Depending on the results of your exam, further tests may be ordered should there be any indication of breast abnormalities. (It’s important to note that neither thermography nor mammograms can definitively determine whether or not breast cancer is present in patients. Subsequent testing is always necessary for confirmation.) If your reading is normal, then your doctor has a baseline reading of your breasts that she or he can compare to followup thermography readings as part of your annual health checkup.

Now that you know more about thermography I think you will agree with me that thermography belongs on the frontlines of every early cancer detection program.

If you are interested in having a thermography exam, please contact me and I will be happy to help you locate a practitioner in your area.

God bless,

Burton