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What Good is a Test, if You Can't Do Anything About It?

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The American Society for Clinical Oncology held its annual symposium in early June 2012 in Chicago. One of the topics was early detection of cancer.[1]

ascoWomen are advised to have mammograms every year. They are also advised to have Pap smears every year. Both tests are supposed to detect early stages of cancer.

The authors ask the question: “Is early detection always a good thing?”

A screening program was instituted in Japan for early detection of neuroblastoma. They found that more infants were diagnosed with neuroblastoma than were later actually found to have clinical disease.

There has been a lot of buzz about screening for prostate cancer with the PSA test, breast cancer with mammography, lung cancer with CT scan screenings. We tend to like mass screenings, as though somehow if we test enough people, we will magically be able to prevent the incidence of this fearsome disease.

Now that may sound like wishful thinking. How does early diagnosis equate to prevention? Well, of course it doesn’t.

It’s like saying that when we measure a high fasting glucose, we have prevented diabetes. Well, we haven’t. We have simply diagnosed it.

If we go a step further, and begin to measure fasting insulin levels, now we begin to be able to say that we are looking at prevention. We are at least measuring the fact that the body is having a lot of difficulty with sugar metabolism, even if we cannot yet diagnose diabetes.

So an allopathic practitioner, if they should happen to find a high fasting insulin, tells the patient: “Please come back next year so that when we can measure a high fasting glucose, we can then treat you with insulin.”

Prevention comes from the Latin “pre” meaning before and “venire” meaning to come. Prevention happens long before early diagnosis.

Getting back to mammography…

What good is doing a test if (a) it can cause the very disease that it purports to diagnose[2] and (b) it is painful and (c) accuracy depends on the experience of the radiologist, the facility in which the test is performed, and even the country in which it is performed?[3,4,5] That pretty well describes mammography.

How about thermography?

Thermography was debunked for many years by the medical profession (at least by the allopathic part of the profession) because they thought that it gave too many false positive results. What was not made clear until years later was that those so-called false positives were actually real positives, just very early diagnosis of inflammation which later became breast cancer. We know that cancer is a disease of inflammation.

thermographyWhat if we could treat the inflammation before it becomes cancer? What if could treat fibrocystic breast disease before it ever meets mammography?

What if we could prevent most of the unnecessary repeat mammograms and biopsies?

Thermography measures the heat which is emitted by the body. Breast cancer, when it is active, shows up as an asymmetric spot of heat in one breast.

At the Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine we use thermography as part of our initial evaluation of almost all our patients. We use the images as our screening tool for breast disease. We treat the inflammation that we see.

It is easy to schedule an evaluation. All it takes is either (1) a prescription from your licensed health care practitioner (MD, DO, NMD, chiropractor, acupuncturist, nurse practitioner or (2) a brief evaluation with one of our practitioners, so that we can examine you, in case we pick up something that the thermogram does not see.

So... mammography vs thermography? Early detection vs prevention?

We have the choice.


[1] Croswell JM, Kramer BS. The Promise and Pitfalls of Early Detection. Downloaded June 2, 2012 from ASCO Daily News.

ascoWomen are advised to have mammograms every year. They are also advised to have Pap smears every year. Both tests are supposed to detect early stages of cancer.

The authors ask the question: “Is early detection always a good thing?”

A screening program was instituted in Japan for early detection of neuroblastoma. They found that more infants were diagnosed with neuroblastoma than were later actually found to have clinical disease.

There has been a lot of buzz about screening for prostate cancer with the PSA test, breast cancer with mammography, lung cancer with CT scan screenings. We tend to like mass screenings, as though somehow if we test enough people, we will magically be able to prevent the incidence of this fearsome disease.

Now that may sound like wishful thinking. How does early diagnosis equate to prevention? Well, of course it doesn’t.

It’s like saying that when we measure a high fasting glucose, we have prevented diabetes. Well, we haven’t. We have simply diagnosed it.

If we go a step further, and begin to measure fasting insulin levels, now we begin to be able to say that we are looking at prevention. We are at least measuring the fact that the body is having a lot of difficulty with sugar metabolism, even if we cannot yet diagnose diabetes.

So an allopathic practitioner, if they should happen to find a high fasting insulin, tells the patient: “Please come back next year so that when we can measure a high fasting glucose, we can then treat you with insulin.”

Prevention comes from the Latin “pre” meaning before and “venire” meaning to come. Prevention happens long before early diagnosis.

Getting back to mammography…

What good is doing a test if (a) it can cause the very disease that it purports to diagnose[2] and (b) it is painful and (c) accuracy depends on the experience of the radiologist, the facility in which the test is performed, and even the country in which it is performed?[3,4,5] That pretty well describes mammography.

How about thermography?

Thermography was debunked for many years by the medical profession (at least by the allopathic part of the profession) because they thought that it gave too many false positive results. What was not made clear until years later was that those so-called false positives were actually real positives, just very early diagnosis of inflammation which later became breast cancer. We know that cancer is a disease of inflammation.

thermographyWhat if we could treat the inflammation before it becomes cancer? What if could treat fibrocystic breast disease before it ever meets mammography?

What if we could prevent most of the unnecessary repeat mammograms and biopsies?

Thermography measures the heat which is emitted by the body. Breast cancer, when it is active, shows up as an asymmetric spot of heat in one breast.

At the Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine we use thermography as part of our initial evaluation of almost all our patients. We use the images as our screening tool for breast disease. We treat the inflammation that we see.

It is easy to schedule an evaluation. All it takes is either (1) a prescription from your licensed health care practitioner (MD, DO, NMD, chiropractor, acupuncturist, nurse practitioner or (2) a brief evaluation with one of our practitioners, so that we can examine you, in case we pick up something that the thermogram does not see.

So... mammography vs thermography? Early detection vs prevention?

We have the choice.

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