Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (75 page)

The next year, Dr. Gautherie spoke at the International Symposium on Biomedical Thermography, reporting on additional research that involved screening more than six hundred women over a period of ten years. He and his colleagues found that an abnormal thermogram was
ten times more significant
as a future risk indicator for breast cancer than a first-order family history of the disease.
³²

Two other researchers speaking at the Strasbourg symposium (H. Spitalier and D. Giraud) had screened 61,000 women over a ten-year period with annual thermograms. They found that persistently abnormal thermograms during those ten years were associated with a
twenty-two-fold greater risk
of future breast cancer (even in patients who showed no other sign of malignancy) and that of all the patients who were eventually diagnosed with cancer, thermography alone was the first alarm in 60 percent of cases.
³³

In 1972, a study led by radiologist Harold J. Isard, M.D., of the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia was published analyzing data from 10,000 women, of whom 4,393 were asymptomatic. Dr. Isard concluded that prescreening these women with thermography instead of mammography would have limited the need for mammograms to 1,028 women—a decrease of 77 percent. He also calculated that combining mammograms (when necessary) with thermography would have resulted in a cancer detection rate of 24.1 per 1,000 instead of the expected 7 per 1,000 using mammograms alone.
³⁴
This study was done before the connection between cellular inflammation and cancer was clear, so doctors were not using thermography as a way to address and reverse cellular inflammation. With today’s knowledge of how to decrease cellular inflammation proactively, plus knowing that some cancers will regress on their own, thermography is the best modality we have to monitor year-to-year status of breast health.

In 1996, California radiologist Parvis Gamagami, M.D., studied the use of thermography to detect certain types of blood vessel formations that often precede breast cancer diagnoses. His research found that 86 percent of nonpalpable breast cancers demonstrated this blood vessel growth, which showed up on thermograms.
³⁵

In 1998, Montreal oncological surgeon John Keyserlingk, M.D., Ph.D., documented that 85 percent of breast cancers could be diagnosed using mammography and clinical breast exams. When thermography was added, the figure was increased to 98 percent.
³⁶

In 2003, California diagnostic radiologist Yuri Parisky, M.D., published a study of 769 women who had suspicious mammograms followed by thermograms. The thermograms were 97 percent correct in detecting breast cancer.
³⁷

Thermography is the missing link that holds the key to true prevention of breast cancer, not just early detection—although it also does that very well. It allows a woman and her health care provider to determine the state of her breast health immediately, and then take steps to improve it long before a more serious condition develops.

The following account is from Judie Harvey, my website editor, about her experience with thermography vs. mammography. She underwent thermography to experience it herself and to compare and contrast it with the conventional breast care she’d had for years. I believe her experience has universal implications for all women. Here is her story:

I recently had a thermogram for the first time and found it to be the most civilized medical test to scan the health of my breasts. Perhaps the best part was getting the results, because not only were they clear and conclusive, but they told the tale of
my
unique body! I didn’t feel like a statistic or a woman falling into a category who now required another procedure or treatment because “that’s the way we handle women with your condition.” To truly appreciate the difference between getting a thermogram and getting a mammogram, let me describe each experience.

THE MAMMOGRAM

“Miss Harvey, there’s an abnormal image on your mammogram. We’d like you to come back for another mammogram and then possibly a sonogram to confirm our findings.” I received this message by phone a couple of days after my routine annual mammogram.
Super!
I thought.
I really enjoyed getting the first mammogram. It’s great to be in a room
buzzing with radiation with a perfect stranger who’s been trained to torture
my body.
The Spanish Inquisition would have ended much sooner if there’d been a mammography machine available to squeeze the living daylights out of someone’s breasts (or testicles).

But the first exam wasn’t that bad. Sure, a perfect stranger touched my breasts, laying them in a tray and squashing them a couple of different ways to see just how flat she could get them. Unpleasant, but the only truly awkward moment was when she asked me the date of my last mammogram. The radiologists in this huge radiology practice in Bethesda, Maryland, where they flatten at least three hundred pairs of breasts a day, like to compare the films. I felt just the tiniest hesitation telling the technician it had been twelve years. I knew she’d probably have to sit down to catch her breath. I didn’t want her to flinch or twitch uncontrollably when she pushed the button on the X-ray machine. It would only mean more images for me to endure.

“Twelve years? Why have you waited so long?” she asked, trying not to admonish me.
Simple,
I answered her in my head.
Every time I
have this test, you find something, because I have lumps and bumps.
And every time you find something, I have to have it pushed and pulled
like taffy and then stuck with needles and biopsied.
“I just know my breasts are normal and healthy,” I responded. I had told my ob-gyn the same thing. He appealed to me, wanting me to know for sure, so I went.

The radiologist looked at me like I had two heads and said, “You know that having an annual mammogram is the best way to prevent breast cancer,” leaving off the rest of the sentence:—
from killing you.

After I got the abnormal results of the first mammogram, I scheduled the second exam and then got to wait in the special room with all the other scared women. They looked tense and nervous, and I guessed that theirs were extremely suspicious lumps. I figured mine couldn’t be all that bad, since they’d waited three weeks to bring me in for a follow-up. In the radiology practice I go to, which is really quite nice and very professional, you leave the office after your first mammogram without knowing the results. If you get called back, you get to see the radiologist, ask questions, and grin and bear it while another perfect stranger mashes every single sensitive spot on your breasts during a mammogram and sonogram.

Fast-forward. The second mammogram found two lumps and a cyst, likely nothing because cancer doesn’t typically present with “friends” (other breast anomalies that are close to each other). But my ob-gyn and the radiologist have to be sure. I’ve started down the path, and now I’m on the assembly line. Next stop—core needle biopsies.

On the day of the procedure, a nurse assisting the doctor takes me to a very clean room. She explains the procedure: local anesthetic and lots of jabbing with a spring-loaded needle. It’s about what I expect, until she tells me tells me about the titanium clip (sometimes called a chip). Apparently, they’ve just initiated a new procedure in their practice mandating that a small titanium clip be inserted into any mass that’s biopsied. The nurse says not to worry, it’s the same material they use to make mechanical hips and it almost never goes off when you go through security at the airport.
What a relief!
When I tell her that I don’t really want the clip and would prefer to just stick with what God gave me, I feel a little tension from her.
Oh dear, not another patient that won’t
comply
is written prominently in her eyes. I know I’m probably going to have to break out the “mommy stare”—a look I’ve perfected that has literally brought grown men to their knees—in order to get out of the clip thing.