58 Breast Cancer Prevention.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

58 Breast Cancer Prevention.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
Hi and welcome to the Cancer Secrets podcast. I am your host and guide, Dr. Jonathan Stegall. Cancer is like a thief who has come to steal, kill and destroy. I have personally seen it wreak havoc on patients, friends and even my own family. But I am on a mission to change the cancer paradigm. The practice of integrative oncology cancer treatment that integrates the best of conventional medicine with the best of alternative therapies backed by science and personalized to each patient. You need a positive voice you can trust. This podcast will share valuable information to give you practical hope for a better outcome. So I invite you to join me on this journey as we seek to change the cancer paradigm together. Hello and welcome back to the Cancer Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Stegall. This is season four and episode number 58. This is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And today we are going to take a deep dive into breast cancer prevention. We previously discussed breast cancer on episode number 52 with a focus on treatment. But in today's episode, I would like to provide some additional information on breast cancer screening, which I think you're going to love. As always, I encourage you to listen with a family member or friend. Today's episode is going to be a great one. Breast cancer affects roughly one in eight women, meaning that every woman has a roughly 13% chance of developing breast cancer at some point in her life.

Speaker1:
And let's not forget that breast cancer can also affect men. Approximately one in 1000 men in the United States will get breast cancer in their lifetime. However, for today's episode, I will be focusing on breast cancer in women and more specifically, how it can be prevented. As I mentioned, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we are being inundated with pink ribbons, pink shirts and all sorts of reminders about breast cancer. While I fully support these efforts to create awareness and raise money for breast cancer research, I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that there are many things we can and should be doing now to better prevent and treat breast cancer. Breast cancer is a particularly emotional cancer since it affects the breasts which we associate with femininity. Cancer affecting the breast is especially personal for women. Many times surgery is indicated as part of treatment, which can result in significant and permanent cosmetic changes. For many women, the fear is that they will look or feel less like a woman. I point this out because some doctors allow themselves to forget just how significant breast cancer and breast cancer treatment can be. In addition, we have all been impacted by breast cancer either having breast cancer ourselves or knowing and loving someone who had breast cancer. There has been a lot of research related to breast cancer, which has resulted in some treatments which work very well. The five year survival for women with breast cancer, regardless of stage, is about 90%.

Speaker1:
This means that 90% of women diagnosed with breast cancer will be alive at the five year mark. This does not necessarily mean that they are cancer free. It simply means that they are alive for lower stage breast cancer, where the cancer is confined to the breast. The five year survival is nearly 100%. For breast cancer that has spread to nearby lymph nodes. The five year survival is 86%. And for women with metastatic or stage four breast cancer, meaning that this cancer has spread to other parts of the body, the five year survival is 28%. Now, we can also look at longer periods of time. We know that the overall five year survival for breast cancer is 90%. That drops to 84% at ten years and 80% at 15 years past the 15 year mark. Survival rates for women with breast cancer parallel that of the general population. In other words, those who don't have cancer. As you can see, detecting breast cancer early is really important. This is why regular screening mammograms starting at age 40 or at least by age 45, are so important. I know that some of you are probably concerned about the radiation exposure, but please know that the amount of radiation you receive from one mammogram is equivalent to the radiation exposure from one airplane flight from New York City to Los Angeles. That's not very much. I also realize that the procedure is uncomfortable, but I feel that the information a mammogram provides is invaluable.

Speaker1:
With that said, mammograms aren't perfect. No imaging modality is. For that reason, I highly recommend breast self-exams as well as routine exams with your doctor. I recommend that women do a monthly breast self-exam, including visual inspection of the breasts as well as palpating or feeling both breasts and both armpits. Assess for anything that seems new or different, including texture changes, color changes, lumps or tender areas. This might seem odd if you aren't used to doing it, but making this a regular habit is very important. If you have questions about how to do a proper breast exam, ask your doctor. And in terms of when to start doing breast self-exams, I honestly feel that no time is too soon. I say this because even though we typically associate breast cancer with women in their forties and fifties, sixties and older, I've had patients who were actually teenagers who were diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. So breast cancer can happen any time. The risk certainly goes up with age. But becoming familiar with your breasts and and having a good system in place for monitoring, I think should honestly start around the time of adulthood. Many people ask about thermography. Unlike mammograms, Thermo Graham's are not an FDA approved screening or diagnostic imaging modality. In other words, thermography should not be used as a stand alone test to screen for breast cancer. It is not a replacement for mammograms.

Speaker1:
However, I do feel that thermography can add value as an adjunctive imaging test in addition to mammograms. Thermal grams detect heat patterns. And as we all know, inflammation from cancer can create temperature changes which can be detected by thermography. It's important to note that thermography is not specific to breast cancer, so increased heat patterns on thermography can be due to any number of causes. So again, it's not a diagnostic test. It's not an approved screening test. I've seen cases where thermography picked up abnormalities, which ultimately turned out to be cancer when mammograms did not. I've also seen the reverse where mammograms detected cancer when Thermo Graham's failed to. As I said before, no imaging modality is perfect, but mammograms are the best. No question. Get your mammogram. But if you choose to do thermography as well, that can sometimes be helpful. Many women ask about other options, such as ultrasounds and MRIs. These can certainly be helpful, especially for women with dense breasts, but they are not indicated as a first line screening modality for the general population. On the topic of breast cancer screening, I'd like to discuss a new test which came out earlier this year. It's called the gallery test spelled GALLERI. It's a simple blood test which can detect the presence of more than 50 types of cancer. I plan to devote a future episode to the gallery test, but I wanted to mention it here since breast cancer is one of the types of cancer it can detect.

Speaker1:
It's important to note that the gallery test isn't designed to replace the above recommendations for screening, but I do feel that it adds a valuable component to cancer screening because it is a new test. It is not covered by insurance. It currently costs just under $1,945, to be exact. I think this is something to strongly consider if your testing budget allows. In addition to being thorough in our testing, we must also be thorough in our lifestyle efforts. Research has shown that regular exercise and maintaining a healthy body weight significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer. A sedentary lifestyle, as well as being overweight or obese, are significant risk factors for developing breast cancer, as well as most other types of cancer as well. In terms of nutrition, eating a whole food plant, heavy diet is helpful. It's important to eat organic as much as possible, focusing on foods as close to their natural state as possible. This means avoiding processed food with difficult to pronounce ingredients. I also want to touch on stress because there is research supporting the idea that significant stress, either through traumatic life events or through chronic stress over a long period of time, increases their risk for cancer. This is still an area of active research, but I do feel that managing stress in a healthy way is very important. We obviously can't avoid stress completely, but by channeling that stress in healthy ways and dealing with it appropriately can be of tremendous value.

Speaker1:
Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, breast cancer still happens. I'd like to outline a few pointers regarding diagnosis and treatment with the understanding that this is in no way an exhaustive list of recommendations. First, please take the time to get a proper diagnosis. If you feel something on a breast self-exam, see your doctor. Don't put it off. If your doctor has a concern and recommends additional testing, please do it. Research has shown that biopsies are very safe. And I mention this because I've had patients who delayed diagnosis because they were scared about having a biopsy. Please don't avoid a biopsy out of concern that it will spread cancer. Many people who believe that a biopsy spread their cancer are basing that on the fact that they were diagnosed with cancer. And imaging soon thereafter showed that the cancer was in other places. Their cancer was already in other places when they were diagnosed, but it just wasn't discovered until more detailed imaging was performed. Rest assured that biopsy techniques today are very sophisticated, and even if biopsies do spread cancer, a cancerous tumor has a much higher likelihood of causing metastasis. Which brings us to another point. If you are a surgical candidate, please have the surgery. Removing the primary tumor significantly reduces the cancer burden in the body. Sometimes we will recommend surgery first, followed by chemotherapy based treatment, and other times we will choose to use chemotherapy and other treatments first to shrink the tumor, allowing for a more straightforward surgery, which is less invasive.

Speaker1:
In either case, we aren't refusing surgery as it is an important part of effective cancer treatment. Chemotherapy doesn't have to be a four letter word either. As I've mentioned many times on this podcast, chemotherapy can be given in smaller doses more often rather than in large doses less often. I found that these smaller doses, given multiple times per week to be extremely effective with a much better side effect profile. We administer this chemotherapy using insulin and local heat. These treatments, plus the proper use of fasting, helps us to better target the chemotherapy where we want it to go to the cancer cells. We support these therapies with a focus on the immune system and the lymphatic system in the context of good nutrition and proper supplementation. I believe that this integrative approach is the best way to treat cancer. And as always, if you want more information about how I treat cancer in my practice, please visit my website at TCF a m. So I hope you found this information on breast cancer prevention to be helpful. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So please take these recommendations seriously. If you are a woman who does not have breast cancer and you want to prevent it, please, please do the proper monitoring and screening tests. Because as we talked about earlier, catching breast cancer early is a big difference maker in terms of prognosis in survival.

Speaker1:
And certainly if you're listening to this and you already have breast cancer, I know it's probably really daunting depending on where you are in your journey. But please let me tell you, you can do this. There are a lot of treatment options available. I'm confident you haven't tried them all. So please, if you're going through breast cancer and you don't know where to turn, please listen to some of our other podcast episodes. Please check out my book, Cancer Secrets. It's a best seller on Amazon and certainly peruse my my practice website as well. If you do that, I'm confident it will give you hope in your journey that you have options you can consider for treatment treatments which work treatments which can can really be successful for you. As always, if you're enjoying these podcasts, please take a minute and provide a review on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. As a reminder, please subscribe to the Cancer Secrets podcast to be notified when new episodes are released. We have some great shows planned and I can't wait to share them with you. As always, please share this podcast with your family and friends. All previous episodes are available for free on our website at Cancer Secrets dot com. I look forward to many great episodes coming up later this season. Thank you as always for being a faithful listener. Until next time, bye bye. He.

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