Breast Thermography — a responsible second look
Автор: Cockburn W.
Источник: IACT — International Academy of Clinical Thermology, thermodoc@verizon.net
Автор: Cockburn W.
Источник: IACT — International Academy of Clinical Thermology, thermodoc@verizon.net
William Cockburn, D.C., D.A.B.F.E., F.I.A.C.T — Breast Thermography — A Responsible Second Look. Breast cancer and other breast diseases have become a tremendous issue in women's health today, particularly in advanced industrialized nations. Also note that approximately 1,000 men get breast cancer yearly.
A procedure which has gone largely unnoticed is Breast Thermography, also known as Breast Thermal Imaging. Breast thermography promises the opportunity of earlier detection of breast disease than has been possible with breast self examination, physician palpation, or mammography.
The medical community investigated breast thermography quite extensively during the late 1970's and early 1980's. The FDA approved the procedure as an adjunctive tool in breast cancer screening, and many physicians, concerned about the radiation exposure of mammography, began to promote thermography as a replacement for mammography. This was error.
Thermography is a non invasive test. This means that it sends nothing into your body. In fact, there is no contact with the body of any kind, no radiation and the procedure is painless.
Utilizing very sophisticated infra-red cameras and desk top computers, thermal imaging technicians simply capture a photograph of the breasts. An infra-red photograph, or heat picture. The data is stored in a computer and then can either be printed on high resolution color printers, or sent electronically to a physician with a similar computer for analysis.
The physician, such as a radiologist or thermal imaging specialist, then compares the heat patterns in the left breast to the right breast. Any difference in heat, or any specific blood vessel patterns in one breast that do not appear in another indicate a physiologic abnormality. This may be pathological (a disease) or it might indicate an anatomical variant. When a thermogram is positive, the job of differential diagnosis begins.
This is all that thermal imaging, or thermography provides. A physiologic marker that some abnormality is present in the breast. Nothing more and nothing less. This is however, an extremely valuable and important finding, but it has historically been the interpretation of these findings that has been the problem, and is now the subject of the "responsible second look".
Scientists and health care researchers have been looking for many decades at tools that can identify breast cancer reliably and quickly. It takes years for a tumor to grow, and the earliest possible indication of abnormality is needed to allow for the earliest possible treatment and intervention.
Thermography was viewed as a possible early diagnostic tool for cancer. The reason I stated that this was error, is quite obvious, but almost totally overlooked by the clinicians and researchers of the day.
Thermography is a test of PHYSIOLOGY. It does not look at anatomy or structure, and it only reads the infra-red heat radiating from the surface of the body...
Here is the problem. Early stage tumors have not grown large enough or dense (thick) enough to be seen by current mammography. When the thermogram picks up the heat from the tumor, a mammogram is performed and often the mass is not detected.
The result of the thermogram is then considered a “False Positive”. The more patients of younger age screened with the so-called false positive, the more suspicion was placed on thermography...
This is where the correct utilization of thermographic imaging will demonstrate it's ability. In the correct model, thermography of the human breast can make a profound and positive impact on breast cancer and other breast disease. Here's the correct model
Thermography is a risk marker for breast pathology. This paper is written for the general public and I am not going to burden the reader with a large base of complex studies that have been published demonstrating the clinical utility and reliability of the procedure. Suffice it to say it is overwhelming.
My purpose is to identify the role of thermography. It is actually quite a simple one...
Two other positive benefits of breast thermal imaging have also been proposed by the author at scientific symposia. As a non-invasive low cost procedure, thermography can be made available to two distinct subpopulations:
It is my position that the role of thermography is vastly different than it originally was determined to be. We must begin to look at this tool for what it really is. A highly accurate, high yield thermometer, much like the one every physician uses daily to determine the presence of fever.
Numerous studies have been published in the United States, England and France demonstrating that patients in the false positive thermographic group I mentioned earlier, those patients with positive thermograms and negative mammograms who were told the thermography was wrong, were determined by long term follow-up to have developed breast cancer in exactly the location thermography had demonstrated its positive finding 5‒10 years earlier.
Thermography's only error is that it is too right — too early. It is our job as scientists, physicians and concerned patients, to identify the appropriate protocols once a thermogram is positive. It is in this capacity that the paradigm must shift.
We have a wonderful and exciting opportunity to at last change the incidence of this horrible disease, by screening younger women utilizing high resolution thermal imaging technology and then placing those women with positive findings into the appropriate lifestyle modification and treatment model which may be able to prevent or minimize not only cancer, but all breast disease. This is our task.
To the beginning