{"content":[{"text":"Originally Published in the Original Internist: September 2010 \n Formatting and Images Updated October 2010. \n Breast Thermography: Helping Make Breast \n Cancer Prevention Possible \n One out of every eight women will develop \n breast cancer during their lifetime impacting the \n lives of their families, friends and communities \n (1). While countless dollars continue to be spent \n on finding a cure, women are led to believe that \n early detection through mammography is their \n best option for beating the disease. Is this really \n all that can be done? Something is missing from \n this picture and desperately needs to be added \n if we are really going to create a world without \n breast cancer.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.088485,"width":0.6809509999999999,"height":0.287851}},{"text":"Mammography has been controversial and has \n come into question in recent years. In fact, the \n US guidelines for screening with mammography \n recently changed from annual examinations at \n age 40 to every other year beginning at age 50 (2). That means women under 50 currently do not have a \n viable method of screening for breast cancer and women over 50 will be screened less frequently. \n Women who develop cancer under age 50 tend to have more aggressive and more life threatening forms \n of the disease so it is imperative they have options for screening. For women over 50, the average \n sensitivity of mammography is 80-90% (3) which sounds great unless you are one in every 5-10 women \n whose cancer is missed. Whether or not you approve of mammography and believe in its usage is not the \n point. Even advocates of the technology admit that the status quo is not good enough.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.388148,"width":0.7628920000000001,"height":0.16243000000000002}},{"text":"While it is obvious that our early detection strategies need to be improved, there is a glaring truth that \n cannot be ignored. Early detection is always too late. For cancer to be detected it must be already \n present and will require treatment that is generally invasive. We need to do better. When I was a child I \n remember the motto of medicine was “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Complementary \n health care professionals along with progressive medical doctors are returning to these earlier roots by \n trying to find ways to help the body function better and prevent disease naturally. While early detection \n and finding a cure remain important, we must shift our focus to prevention if breast cancer is going to be \n eliminated.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.56239,"width":0.755714,"height":0.11894600000000011}},{"text":"To this end, enter a 40 year old imaging technology called thermography that has recently made a \n comeback. Thermography is a non invasive radiation free method of visualizing breast physiology by \n identifying vascular changes and fever at the surface of the breast. By evaluating physiology, we include \n an important component that has been missed by anatomical imaging such as mammography. \n Thermography Basics:","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.692996,"width":0.7519100000000001,"height":0.09623000000000004}},{"text":"Here is how it works. Heat is produced in the breast by normal tissue metabolism and is carried to its \n surface by the blood supply. Our bodies naturally release heat to the environment in the form of infrared \n energy. Thermography uses a camera with a specialized infrared detector that captures this energy and \n produces an image. The image can then be analyzed allowing an interpreter to accurately measure the \n temperature of the region of interest to the tenth of a degree.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.80042,"width":0.7486440000000001,"height":0.075461}}],"images_bbox":[{"left":0.485294,"top":0.22274,"width":0.382353,"height":0.222727}],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[{"left":0.485294,"top":0.22274,"width":0.382353,"height":0.222727}]}