Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I am Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of
functional medicine.
The last two episodes of the show, we were talking about preventing breast cancer, stopping
breast cancer before it starts as a supplement to the conversation that we hear about every
October focusing on earlier detection and funding more treatments for breast cancer
that you already have.
So people were excited to hear about that.
I got a lot of positive comments about that.
I've had a health fair at the office with a dozen other practitioners last month where
we had over a hundred people pass through on a Saturday, got a lot of great questions
and response, that was all very exciting.
But the most common questions I got after these last two episodes of the show were just
more wanting more information about early detection and, you know, what's the, should
I get a mammogram, how often should I get a mammogram, at what age, what about thermography,
what about ultrasound and MRI, what's the best way to find out what I really need, et
cetera.
And these are not easy questions to answer because everyone's different circumstances
vary.
What I try to do is arm people with information that they can use to make informed choices.
So here are some things to consider.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2007 says that breast cancers
were first identified by mammogram in 16% of women by a provider on an exam in their
office by 9% of the time, by the spouse, 2%, 75% of patients first identified their tumors
by self-exam.
The National Breast Cancer Foundation.org website says adult women of all ages are encouraged
to do a self-exam, breast self-exam at least once a month.
And Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Professor of Breast Cancer states that 40%
of diagnosed breast cancers are detected by women who feel a lump, so establishing a regular
monthly self-exam is very important.
And a 2003 National Health Interview survey of 361 breast cancer survivors found that
57% reported detecting their breast cancer on their own either by self-examination or
by accident, and 43% reported their breast cancer was detected by mammogram.
Mammography in women under 30 significantly increases the risk of breast cancer.
For this reason, mammography is rarely performed on women under 30, and its risks may outweigh
its benefit in women under 50, which is why the recommendation has long been by most doctors
to begin mammography at age 50.
That has changed.
They've reduced it to 40 again.
We're going to come back to that.
But everyone knows that radiation is bad and should be minimized as much as possible, and
there are studies on this as well.
So annual screening and diagnostic workup of 100,000 women.
This is a modeling study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Radiation Induced
Breast Cancer Incidence and Mortality from mammography screening, from getting mammograms.
Annual screening and diagnostic workup of 100,000 women aged 40 to 74, 35 screening
examinations per woman would induce, on average, 125 breast cancers, resulting in 16 deaths.
Women with large breasts requiring extra views for complete examination are at higher risk
with more than twice as many radiation-induced breast cancers, 266, and breast cancer deaths,
25 compared to women with small or average breasts, 113 breast cancers, 15 breast cancer
deaths.
So these are estimates based on typical standards for screening.
Compare this to annual screening from 40 to 70 years, biennial every two years screening
from 50 to 74 years was projected to result in one-fifth as many radiation-induced breast
cancers.
So that's a lot of numbers.
So again, what they're saying is being screened every two years starting at age 50 will result
in one-fifth as many radiation-induced breast cancers compared to getting screened every
year starting at age 40.
So any radiation, including mammograms, does increase your risk of getting breast cancer,
but mammography, mammograms also dramatically reduce your risk of dying from breast cancer
because it can detect it much earlier.
For the standard recommendations of getting screened every two years from age 50 to 74,
23 breast cancer deaths will be averted for each radiation-induced breast cancer.
So that means you're 23 times more likely to identify and survive a breast cancer that
would otherwise go undetected than you are to get breast cancer from the radiation from
getting a mammogram every two years from age 50 to 74.
Nevertheless, the latest guidelines from the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society of Breast Surgeons, and
the National Comprehensive Cancer Network now advocate starting routine mammograms at
age 40.
So this debate is going to continue.
There are no simple answers.
Everyone has to make a choice for themselves, but the general outlines are all radiation
is bad, some radiation is essential and can save your life.
Approximately 1 to 2% of screening mammograms identify an abnormality that necessitates
a biopsy and around 80% of the biopsy lesions are benign.
One of the main things they're looking for when they find a reason to do a biopsy on
a mammogram is calcifications.
So calcifications are calcium deposits within breast tissue, which are little white spots
or flecks on a mammogram.
And they're common and they're especially prevalent after age 50.
And they're usually non-cancerous.
So a proper radiologist can interpret these findings to tell you whether they're likely
to be cancerous or not.
But just to generally get a little better understanding about this, it depends on a
couple of things.
So are they big or small?
So macro, large calcifications, large white dots or dashes are almost always non-cancerous
and require no further testing or follow-up.
Micro calcifications, so little fine white specks similar to grains of salt, are also
usually non-cancerous, but if they're in certain patterns, then they can be an early sign of
cancer.
So that's one of the major things that oncologists and radiologists are looking for on your mammogram.
Billions of women get mammograms every two years after age 50, some every year, varying
ages to start with depending on risk factors.
The general outlines to consider are that women with small, dense breasts are more difficult
to detect.
The test is less likely to identify a cancer early to justify the radiation risk.
And women with larger breasts require the study itself.
The mammogram is going to use more radiation to do an effective test.
So the radiation from mammograms is always going to be a concern.
And it's painful due to the compression.
When they train oncologists to examine breasts with suspected cancer, they're trained to
examine the tissue very delicately because if you put too much pressure on a tumor, a
breast cancer tumor, it could cause it to spread.
And yet when you go in and get your mammogram, the radiologists put your breast in a vice
and clamp down hard so they can flatten it out enough to get a good image, which can
be painful and discourage people from getting regular mammograms.
I'm Dr. Todd Bankley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We're talking about breast cancer prevention, early detection more specifically today, questions
about mammography.
I did on the last episode, last two episodes, a long discussion about ways that you can
prevent cancer from occurring in the first place.
And the most common questions I got after that were around, you know, which form of
early detection is best for me.
And I'm sorry I can't answer that.
It's different for everybody.
It's a complicated series of things to consider.
And so the first part of the show, we've just gone over mammograms and the risk of cancer
from the radiation from mammograms and how you're dramatically more likely to discover
and survive a cancer than you ever are to get cancer from the radiation associated with
mammograms.
But, you know, some people are going to do mammograms and some people aren't.
And because of that, mostly because people aren't going to do it regularly, many millions
of women do, but in spite of that, more breast cancers are discovered on self-examination.
So I strongly encourage every woman to do a regular self-examination at least once a
month, preferably once a week.
You can do it in the shower, go online and just Google breast self-examination if you,
you know, if you haven't done it in a while, just to brush up on the best ways to make
sure that you're doing that effectively.
And getting, learning how to do that well on yourself so that you notice when something
changes is the way most breast cancers are identified.
It's also important to keep in mind that the microscopic changes on that microcalcifications,
for example, that can show up on a mammogram will detect cancer earlier.
But it also must be said that most breast cancers detected on a mammogram are about
the size of a raisin.
And that's billions of cells that have been there for years.
And so, you know, that's early detection, but how early is that?
So the other most common question I get about, you know, prevention, early detection is about
thermography.
So if you're a health-oriented person, if you're looking for alternative to standard
medical recommendations, then you may or may not have heard of thermography.
If you haven't, thermography uses infrared photography, heat detecting, photographic
process to examine the breasts to detect heat.
So if you have any kind of disease process going on in your breasts or any other part
of your body, that diseased tissue is going to be attracting nutrients to itself, increased
circulation is going to be responding to that disease process, and that will cause a heat
signal that is detected on thermography.
So the thermography has been around since the late 50s, and it's largely poo-pooed by
the medical profession.
There's studies continually to come out and say that it's useless to detect breast cancer
compared to getting mammograms every year.
But that's changing.
And it has been changing progressively over the years, largely because it's...
So there are several things.
It's much simpler to do a mammogram than to do a good thermography exam.
When you're measuring heat signals from breast tissue, there are several things that you
have to do to make that test accurate.
The room has to have a very tightly controlled temperature.
You have to sit in the room after undressing and sitting in front of the camera by yourself
and wait for your body temperature to normalize.
You have to make sure that you're not too hot or too cold.
They turn off the heating and the air conditioning.
So it's a little tricky to do everything properly to get a good test result.
And all practitioners of thermography are trained in this and they know how to make
sure to minimize any artifacts or...
They know how to optimize those situations.
So if you go get a thermography exam, it's available, widely available, Google Thermography,
it's available in Inventura.
It's a good thing to do because detecting a heat signal in any tissue in your body is
a sign of an inflammatory process or a disease process.
So as long as you're not going to get scared and run off and do something unnecessary based
on that, it's good information to have.
And several reports say that thermography can detect cancer eight to 10 years earlier
than a mammogram.
Well the standard pushback against that in the medical community is that it's not as
accurate.
For example, a study published in Breast Care, the journal from Switzerland in 2016, showed
that the accuracy of thermography was 70% versus 77% for mammograms.
Well that was 2016.
Here's a more recent study from the International Journal of Surgery published in 2023.
The title is Breast Cancer Preclinical Screening Using Infrared Thermography and Artificial
Intelligence and it showed that the sensitivity, well it compared the sensitivity of ultrasound,
mammograms, breast, self-exam, and infrared thermography for detecting breast cancer.
And the accumulated evidence showed that infrared thermography was equivalent to standard breast
imaging and clinical examination, meaning getting a breast exam by a trained doctor
on a routine medical visit.
And even more interesting is this is a study that was done in China with cameras provided
and an app on a smartphone that allowed women to do self-exams and send the data in over
the internet and use sophisticated artificial intelligence to analyze the data to produce
these results.
So that's something that's obviously not available here.
I have no idea when it might be available here.
And there's some obvious questions about controlling for temperature in the room and they do, they
did describe pretty well in the study the instructions that were provided to the women
doing these self-exams and it also incorporated a second leg in the study doing clinical exams
with a similar system in doctors' offices.
So it's something that hopefully will continue to be studied and it's a fascinating opportunity
to make it easier for any woman to do earlier, avail themselves of earlier detection without
any radiation and any of the pain and other problems with getting in to do annual mammograms.
There is another device that is being studied in Europe that uses a cone-shaped device that
you can also both use at home or in a doctor's office using a liquid crystal thermography,
a different type of measuring heat but more accurate because they're putting a cup on
directly over each breast and measuring heat signals that way.
So obviously it's going to eliminate the need to control the temperature and the humidity
in the room and takes less time for you to wait to acclimate until both of those are
the same.
And this is these devices, it's called a Braster device, B-R-A-S-T-E-R.
They've been studying it for a few years now and it is becoming available in other countries.
It's not available in the U.S. yet but I'm going to continue to watch that and I'll let
you know as more data becomes available on that.
And most importantly, the standard thermography that is available here in the U.S. right now,
in Ventura, is getting better and better by virtue of the way they analyze the data that's
gathered by the infrared thermography itself.
So infrared thermography is basically just a means of using a type of camera that measures
heat signals emanating from any tissue in your body, including breast tissue.
So if you Google thermography versus mammography right now, you'll probably get a search result
that says that thermography is nowhere near as good as mammography, mammograms for early
detection of breast cancer, but that is going to change.
It's changing already.
This study in China is really profound in the data that it got showing that even having
people do self-exams, how amazing would it be to maybe rent a camera that you could hook
up to an app on your phone following detailed instructions, collect images that were sent
in and then analyzed by artificial intelligence.
artificial intelligence is kind of scary because who knows what's going to happen in a whole
broad categories of our lives.
But in radiography, it's already making huge inroads.
There's all kinds of studies out already showing that using computers that have absorbed and
had inputted data from thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions
of previous images can diagnose and identify conditions on x-rays and CAT scans and other
images better than radiologists already.
It's an unfortunate thing.
And there's exceptions to that too.
It's good to have both, but radiologists, every radiologist that looks at x-rays, all
chiropractors are trained how to analyze x-rays.
I've looked at lots of x-rays and found things that other doctors have missed, especially
if somebody came into me years ago.
The most common example when I would catch something that somebody else missed is if
they went to the ER.
If somebody gets in an accident and they go to the ER or they get some x-rays, they bring
their films in and they find stuff that something was missed because they're not spending a
lot of time looking at it.
They're just looking for a fracture, something that needs emergent care, and it's not necessarily
their job to identify everything else possibly that could be showing up on that x-ray.
In the expanding use of computers that use artificial intelligence, compiling massive
amounts of data, looking at hundreds and thousands of scans to identify patterns, computers are
becoming better at that than the human eye in a well-trained professional.
And that's likely to be a good thing going forward.
These studies, for example, I think I forgot to mention, these studies were determining
these outcomes by imaging people and then biopsying, then doing biopsies to confirm
whether or not they had cancer.
So the only way they know the accuracy of these various tests is by doing biopsies on
them later and verifying whether or not these women had cancer.
So they were, they're robust studies.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
We've been talking about the relative utility of various types of examinations to detect
breast cancer early.
And in review, it's important for every woman to do self-breast exams.
Most breast cancers are detected by breast self-exam.
That doesn't mean that's the most accurate way to detect them because you can't feel
a tumor on a self-exam until it's become a certain size.
Mammograms can find tumors that are smaller than that, and they can find evidence of microscopic
calcifications in breast tissue before anybody, even a doctor, can feel a mass on a breast
exam.
And those are all important things.
And risk factors are important to consider, which I've mentioned before.
But the bottom line is if you're not getting mammograms, then thermography is a really
good idea.
But in my opinion, everyone should do breast self-exams and thermography.
And given your risk factors, in discussion with your doctor or your family history, determine
whether or not and how often, probably get mammograms too.
There are exceptions to that.
Everyone's situation is different.
There's no simple example that applies to everyone.
So if you want more information on this, please give me the opportunity to have a consultation
with you and identify.
That is the most appropriate thing for you.
Everyone's different.
You're as different on the inside as you are on the outside.
Functional medicine is the use of diagnostic tests to identify conditions early enough
that you can usually heal them with better food, exercise, and supplements, and where
necessary make an appropriate referral to a medical specialist.
In the worst case scenario, if you get diagnosed with cancer and end up in an oncologist's
office, they're not going to tell you about anything that you can do to maximize your
immune system function and give your body a fighting chance to kill off the cancer on
its own and heal itself.
They're going to stop, do whatever they can to minimize your risk of death.
They're going to recommend the standard treatments, standards of care, I mean, that you get the
same treatment everyone else does.
They're going to recommend radiation chemotherapy and surgery.
If you ask, can I take these supplements to boost my immune system at the same time?
A lot of oncologists are confused about that.
There are some really good ones that are holistically oriented, especially in Southern California,
who are not, who understand that you can do both.
You can do all of the above.
You can do the standard radiation chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and in between the rounds of
those things, flood your river of life, flood your body with nutrients to give it a fighting
chance to heal and repair itself, maximize your immune system function.
Something as simple as taking adequate amounts of vitamin D can dramatically reduce your
risk of getting cancer in the first place.
Getting your vitamin N review, getting your blood level of vitamin D up to 60 can reduce
your risk of breast cancer by 80% compared to a blood level of 20, which is what most
people test at if they're not supplementing vitamin D.
Thank you for listening.
As always, I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.
You can email me at drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
You can text me at 805-218-3939.
Look at that.
I just gave out my cell phone.
Just so you know, my cell phone is always off.
If you call, I never answer the phone.
You can leave a voicemail and I'll call you back.
The best way to reach me is via text or email.
Thank you for tuning in.
Do something this weekend to be healthier than you were last weekend.
Eat some vegetables.
Do you have some vegetables?
Are you growing vegetables on your own?
The best way to get more vegetables in your diet is to plant some in your own garden because
then you're going to be attached to them.
You're not going to let them go to waste.
You're going to be watching them grow and you're going to want to eat them.
Add some more vegetables to your diet to be healthier this weekend than you were last
weekend.
Have a fabulous weekend.
See you next Friday at 2 p.m.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.