The use of thermal imaging in dentistry is still relatively new, but the technology has already shown promise in helping dentists to identify dental conditions that may otherwise go unnoticed.

One of the primary advantages of thermal imaging in dentistry is that it allows for the early detection of dental problems. In traditional dental exams, dentists rely on visual examination, X-ray, and other diagnostic tools to identify dental conditions such as cavities, gum disease, and oral cancer. However, these methods are not always able to identify problems in their early stages. Thermal imaging, on the other hand, can detect even the slightest changes in temperature, allowing dentists to detect dental problems before they become more serious.

Another advantage of thermal imaging is its non-invasive nature. Traditional dental imaging techniques, such as X-rays, can be uncomfortable and expose patients to radiation. In contrast, thermal imaging is non-invasive and painless, making it a safer and more comfortable option for patients. This is especially beneficial for patients who are anxious about dental procedures or who have a low pain tolerance.

In addition to its early detection capabilities, non-invasive nature, and cost-effectiveness, thermal imaging has a range of other benefits in dental applications. For example, thermal imaging can be used to detect inflammation and infection in the teeth and gums, as well as to assess the effectiveness of treatments such as root canal therapy.

According to a study published in the Journal of Innovative Dentistry, thermal imaging has an overall accuracy rate of 94.9% in detecting dental problems, including caries, periodontal disease, and oral cancer (Acharya et al., 2014).

While the use of thermal imaging in dentistry is still relatively new, the technology has already shown promise in improving the detection and treatment of dental conditions. By allowing for early detection, providing a non-invasive option, offering a quick and easy procedure, monitoring progress, and reducing costs, thermal imaging has the potential to revolutionize the field of dentistry.

Pain may originate from many different sources, and sometimes it could be very challenging to understand the cause of this pain. For answers to this problem, I have decided to go to my good friend and expert on the subject of pain Dr. Schwartz in South Carolina. 

Dr. Schwartz’s drive to figure out how to eradicate pain has led him to embrace the spirit of innovation. As a result of his work, he has achieved numerous Board Certifications, published hundreds of articles, and has been Guest Professor at Medical Universities around the world. He has lectured extensively and spoken at the World Health Organization in the United Nations. But for him, education is not a thing of the past. His mission is to find the best possible way to treat pain at its source. 

In this interview, you will find out how medical thermography helps to facilitate breakthroughs in the way sympathetic pain is diagnosed and treated while improving the chances for a favorable treatment outcome.

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To watch this video interview please click HERE

Ductal Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS) has a classification as stage zero (0) cancer. As much as 25% of all positive mammography findings are DCIS. 

In the majority of cases, DCIS is not a life-threatening condition and yet when the big "C" diagnosis is pronounced, it puts the fear of death into women's hearts. 

Are we over-diagnosing and over-treating people that have no life-threatening condition? Learn about DCIS by watching this insightful video interview with Mark Nathaniel Mead, MSc.

Mark has an extensive background as a holistic nutritionist, medical writer, and integrative cancer coach. 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS INTERVIEW

Why Is Your Thyroid Health Important?

Women are eight times more likely to develop thyroid disease than men. Most thyroid dysfunctions start at the peri-menopausal or menopausal stage, precisely when the entire endocrine system undergoes a profound change.  In many instances, this is when breast cancer begins to develop as well.  Low functioning thyroid (hypothyroidism) usually precedes most breast conditions. Identifying and correcting this problem can lead to better health and prevention of many health problems, including breast cancer.

What are the signs?

Under-active thyroid condition may present with one or a combination of the following symptoms:

Fatigue, insomnia, low sex drive, being cold, cold hands and feet, dry skin, weight gain or inability to lose weight, constipation, muscle pains, depression, poor memory function (brain fog), water retention, puffy eyes, infertility, low body temperature, goitre. I hate admitting this, but I was wrong to say that there doesn’t exist such a problem as insomnia. It does, and it’s horrible. I felt like a squeezed lemon for weeks because of it. My doc said Ambien can help me, so I got a prescription and bought a pack. Now I feel like a new person. I’m fresh, and rested, and always in a good mood. Great medicine, by all means.

This list of symptoms is not complete but are commonly seen in clinical practice.

Why Are Thyroid Conditions Often Missed or Untreated?

Women often go to their family doctors complaining about some of the symptoms listed above. Unfortunately,  no treatment is provided because their blood results come back ‘normal.’ It could be very frustrating when due to the test results being in the ‘normal’ range, your symptoms or conditions may not get the treatment they require. Of course, there could be many other factors causing or contributing, for instance, to weight gain, however excluding thyroid dysfunction simply because the test result is normal often could be very detrimental to a patient’s health. In some cases, the current methods of thyroid testing are simply inadequate. Often in medicine today we’re over-reliant on test results while discounting or ignoring patients’ signs and symptoms if they do not fit into a particular diagnostic model.

What Should You Be Looking For?

Proper testing of thyroid should include TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone), Free T-3, Free T-4 and Thyroid Antibodies. Also, it is imperative to check the way your adrenals are functioning by checking Cortisol and DHEA levels. If your adrenals are under stress, that can affect your thyroid function. 

High estrogen levels might also suppress your thyroid function, so please check all of your hormones. For the endocrine system to function optimally, all of its components must work efficiently. Nutrients like Iodine and Selenium are co-factors in thyroid metabolism. A deficiency of these and other essential nutrients may be responsible for specific symptoms, as they all play a role in optimizing the health of the thyroid gland. Lacking these essential nutrients perpetuates a thyroid problem at the cellular level, although TSH lab values may seem normal. 

How Can You Test Your Thyroid?

Using thermography imaging is an efficient way of assessing the state of your thyroid health. We often see low body temperature or cool area over thyroid that usually correlates to a patient’s symptoms. This thermographic information often initiates a more thorough investigation to diagnose and treat the hypothyroid condition properly. 

Thyroid function is central to all of the metabolic functions of the body, and it profoundly affects our overall health. By correcting this problem as early as your first symptoms develop or sooner, you will not only be proactive in keeping a healthy thyroid; you will also decrease your risk of developing breast cancer and improve your overall health.

Women who have gum disease are 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. In North America, 75% of adults suffer from various forms of gum disease or other oral pathologies. In other words, 75% of adult population is at increased risk of cancer because of poor oral health. Research published by Dr. Robert Jones found that there is a very high co-relationship between root canal treated teeth and breast cancer. In a five-year study of 300 breast cancer cases, he found that 93% of the women with breast cancer had root canals, 7% had other oral pathology. Further, breast tumours (in most cases), occurred on the same side of the body as the root canal.

One factor connecting oral pathology to breast disease is something called Chronic Apical Periodontitis or CAP.  CAP is a group of inflammatory conditions caused by microorganisms (mainly bacteria) infecting the necrotic root canal system. CAP often develops asymptomatically, and the prognosis is typically less favourable when it is detected late.  

In addition to higher incidents of cancer, root canal treatments also contribute to a higher risk of heart attacks. The DNA of oral pathogens typical of the root canal and gum-infected flora is consistently found in coronary atherosclerotic plaque.

Thus chronically infected teeth, both with and without root canal treatments, due to its extraordinary ability to deplete antioxidants and promote chronic inflammation in affected tissues and organs, can be considered the single most important cause of heart attacks and single most important cause of head, neck and breast cancer.

I have been researching and lecturing on this subject for well over a decade, and it is astounding that most health professionals remain yet in the dark about this while the evidence is overwhelming. 

So, what can you do and how can you find out if you have oral inflammation even if you have no symptoms? 

First, you should understand that while regular dental checkups may be necessary, the conventional dental methods may not be useful in identifying the problem discussed here. Regular dental x-rays will not detect early signs of CAP or other oral pathologies and infections. 

However, with the use of thermography, we have been able to locate these inflammatory conditions at their earliest stage and alert many patients to help them rectify problems before they lead to more severe disease.  Thermography should be incorporated into regular dental/oral examination to help identify conditions that lead to chronic inflammation.  

I want to encourage all of you who are reading this to take a very proactive attitude about your oral health. It may be one of the most significant factors in breast cancer prevention.

When we think about screening for breast cancer most will automatically think about mammography as a primary screening test.  The recently published Canadian National Breast Screening Study particularly looked at mammography screening and the results have been very disturbing. This study was conducted from 1980 to 2005, over 25 years and included 90,000 women. This was one of the largest and well-designed studies in the world that looked at the efficacy of mammography screening and the reduction of death from breast cancer.

The results were quite startling that, after 25 years of follow up, breast cancer deaths were almost identical between the mammography group and the control (non-mammography) group. Further, even when looking at deaths that occurred during the screening period in the first five years the numbers between the two groups were identical. Thus there was absolutely no benefit from the mammography screening for women age 40 to 49 as well as for women age 50 to 59.  (see BMJ)

These findings are really important and hopefully will change the way we screen for breast cancer. It is important to note that The Swiss Medical Board recently also recommended that mammography screening should be abolished while presenting the same conclusion. (see Swiss) However, it is not just the ineffectiveness of mammography screening that is problematic but also the potential harm from this way of screening needs to be addressed. 

Using the data from the 25 Year Canadian National Breast Cancer Screening (CNBSS) we can see that many women are told that they don’t have cancer, and therefore getting false reassurance. Further, there are complications from the investigation of false positive tests. The use of mammography increases the false positive rate.  Another useful point to consider is that the mere finding of cancer, as a result of a screening test, does not necessarily imply benefit. Some detected cancers are simply not curable by available treatment. And in other cases, some detected cancer may never have become life-threatening in the patient’s lifetime either because they are cured on their own or they are over diagnosed.

It is important to understand how over diagnosis occurs in mammography screening. In some cases, breast cancer would regress spontaneously if left alone and would not have continued to grow. In other cases, cancer progresses very slow to be threatening even in the longest of lifetimes. The body’s defense mechanism comes into play and arrests the rapid growth of such cancers. Thus the problem of over diagnosis is not something that should be taken lightly as it presents a serious problem. It appears that 22% of screen-detected cases were over diagnosed and 50% of impalpable cases detected by mammography were over diagnosed. In other words, 1 in 424 women who received mammography screening were over diagnosed with invasive breast cancer yet they had no life-threatening disease!

Estimates for non-invasive breast cancers such as Lobular Carcinoma In Situ (LCIS) and Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) present us with even more dramatic results. It is assumed that there is a great benefit of surgically removing these lesions because it prevents them from becoming invasive; yet unlike other cancers, it has never been demonstrated that it is true for breast cancer. Based on the CNBSS numbers it has been shown that when it comes to in situ cancers 35% of screen detected cases are over diagnosed and an astounding 72% of impalpable cases detected by mammography are over diagnosed.

The implications for over diagnosis and over treatment are very serious. It shows us that the amount of lead-time gained by mammography has been wrong all along; it is only one year versus previously assumed four years. It is not surprising that all this screening does not impact mortality rates because you can only backdate cancer by one year with the use of mammography. Breast cancer takes a long time to develop and cancer detection by mammography occurs not earlier than in year 8 or 9 in the progression of this disease; hardly an early detection by any standard.  There is definitely a need to develop and use other available technologies to identify breast cancer much earlier. 

I have been advocating the use of breast thermography in conjunction with other screening modalities for many years now. Breast thermography is not a stand-alone screening test for breast cancer and should never be used on its own. However, breast thermography can provide us with a very early sign of breast abnormalities that can lead to breast cancer. An abnormal breast thermography image is the single most important marker of high risk for developing breast cancer. In my view, it would be more beneficial and far more economical to use breast thermography to identify a high-risk group of women that will need additional testing and higher levels of conventional follow up.  This group can be additionally screened using frequent breast examinations, regular hormone testing, other biomarkers associated with high risk for breast cancer, along with ultrasound and diagnostic mammography when necessary. 

There is no need to settle for existing problems using mass screening mammography that at best appears to be ineffective and at worst downright harmful. Many will say that mammography is not perfect but this is the only test that we have available and no matter the problems associated with mammography screening, the benefits outweigh the problems. Clearly this is no longer the case and it never was. This belief system is outdated and needs to change based on scientific evidence presented. It is imperative to rethink our approach to breast cancer and use all available technologies appropriately. If we seriously want to save lives,  we need to incorporate the use of breast thermography as another useful marker in breast cancer detection and prevention plan.