I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Lauri Wakefield, who hosts the Inspiring Journeys podcast, to talk about living toxin-free.
Our discussion covered a ton of topics related to living toxin-free, and how that can help you improve your breast health, including:
How to reduce toxin exposure
The importance of self-education
Thermography vs. mammograms
Practical tips for a toxin-free lifestyle
Detoxification and hormonal balance
Endocrine disruptors and environmental toxins
So, if you want to know how to live a toxin-free life, and how that can benefit your breast health, then you don’t want to miss this informative episode, which you can listen to using the player below.
When it comes to detecting breast cancer, the options for women in America are limited.
Our standard, conventional medical establishment’s over-emphasis on treatment has largely ignored the efficacy and value of prevention, instead choosing to focus on drugs and radiation over safer alternatives like breast thermograms.
This is a big part of the reason why modern medicine has failed to reduce disease rates, including those for breast cancer.
With that in mind, this is why it’s so important to educate women about the detection and prevention options they have and empower them to take control of their health.
As far as I’m concerned, prevention is the cure, and it’s our first line of defense against breast cancer.
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of getting a breast thermogram, I’ve included a video from Breast Thermography International below, which should tell you everything you need to know.
Offering Breast, Upper Body, and Full Body Exams
Contact me to book your thermography appointment today.
Many women, including some doctors, fear mammograms are causing over-treatment and mammogram radiation is resulting in more cases of cancer.
According to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine, between 1976 and 2008, 1.3 million U.S. women received unnecessary and invasive cancer treatments, including surgery, radiobiology, hormone therapy, and chemotherapy.
This is in large part due to routine mammograms detecting harmless tumors.
Other studies conducted in European countries have concluded that mammograms reduce the risk of death from cancer by less than 10% or not at all.
But when combined with anatomical testing, breast thermography can reduce the number of false positives and over-treatment of breast cancer by demonstrating whether a tumor is metabolically active or not.
Mammogram Radiation Puts Young Women at Risk
More than 20,000 cases of breast cancer have been reported annually in U.S. women under the age of 40.
Unfortunately, when cancer strikes a younger woman, it is typically a more aggressive form and is less likely to respond to treatment.
But despite this greater risk, younger women have been consistently neglected by traditional breast cancer screenings, and besides mammography, there is currently no other routine screening test for women under the age of 40.
Thermography, on the other hand, offers an ideal test for this age group, especially considering that it’s radiation-free.
If you’d like to learn more about the dangers of mammogram radiation, check out the video below from NutritionFacts.org.
Offering Breast, Upper Body, and Full Body Exams
Contact me to book your thermography appointment today.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with author and host of the A Quest for Well-Being podcast, Valeria T. Koopman, to talk about what you can do to ensure you have healthy breasts.
We had an amazing conversation, which covered many aspects of breast health, including:
Your relationship with your breasts
The benefits of breast thermography
The harmful effects of environmental estrogens
How your oral health can affect your breast health
Nutrition and supplementation for healthy breasts
So, if you’re looking to learn more about what you can do to have healthy breasts, including how radiation-free thermography can help you detect potential breast health issues as early as possible, then this is a video you cannot afford to miss.
With summer not too far away, you may think your vitamin D will soon be back to optimal levels.
But if that’s what you think, you can think again.
Functional medicine guru Dr. Mark Hyman says, “Unless you live 20 minutes south of Atlanta, and you are outside totally naked for 15 minutes a day in the sun, you need vitamin D.”
African Americans and other dark-skinned people, along with those living in northern latitudes, make significantly less vitamin D than other groups. The darker your skin is, the less likely it is you will produce adequate vitamin D levels from sun exposure alone.
That being said, it is important to get vitamin D3 through diet, sunlight, or supplements every day.
This is because when vitamin D is sent directly to the body’s tissues it is only active for 24 hours. So, to boost our immune system and ward off cancer we need new input every day.
Vitamin D impacts our bones, regulates calcium and strengthens our immune system. What’s more, researchers have found that vitamin D directly affects the cells in the breast.
Vitamin D influences virtually every cell in your body and is one of nature’s most potent cancer fighters.
Inside almost every cell in the body is a vitamin D receptor (VDR). A VDR is a protein that controls the expression of genes. The vitamin D in our blood enters breast cells, binds to the VDRs, and triggers positive change. Vitamin D is also able to enter cancer cells and trigger natural cell death, preventing, slowing, or even stopping cancer growth.
There have been many studies on vitamin D and breast cancer that demonstrate a 50-80% lower risk of breast cancer diagnosis for women with serum levels of >40 ng/ml versus levels of 25 ng/ml or lower.
According to Dr. Cedric F. Garland, a professor of family and preventive medicine, “As long as vitamin D receptors are present, tumor growth is prevented and kept from expanding its blood supply. Vitamin D receptors are not lost until a tumor is very advanced. This is the reason for better survival in patients whose vitamin D blood levels are high.”
Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington D.C. discovered a connection between high vitamin D intake and a reduced risk of breast cancer.
These findings, which were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research, revealed that increased dosage of the sunshine vitamin was linked to a 75% reduction in overall cancer growth and a 50% reduction in tumor cases among those already having the disease.
Vitamin D supplementation helped control the development and growth of breast cancer, especially with estrogen-sensitive breast cancer.
Rochester Medical Center examined vitamin D levels in 155 breast cancer patients in the months before and after surgery. They found suboptimal levels to be highly predictive of the biological markers associated with more aggressive tumors.
The average level in patients with breast cancer in the United States is 17 ng/ml.
At any rate, having an optimal vitamin D serum level helps to prevent a wide variety of diseases and other health issues. Vitamin D levels need to be between 50 and 70 ng/ml year round. According to recent findings from the D*action study, adults need about 8,000 IUs of D3 per day to get serum levels above 40 ng/ml.
If you take high doses of oral vitamin D3 supplements, you may also need to increase your vitamin K2 intake, as vitamin D increases the need for K2 so your body can absorb calcium.
There is new evidence that vitamin K2 directs the calcium to your skeleton, while preventing it from being deposited where you don’t want it.
The tricky thing about vitamin D deficiency is that there aren’t any symptoms until you are really depleted. Only a blood test can check vitamin D levels.
Insurance pays for D testing. But if you’re without insurance, there are independent labs online that will do the test.
Conventional health experts tell us that a level of 20 ng/ml to 50 ng/ml is considered adequate for healthy people and anything below 12 ng/ml is a deficiency.
But the truth is those are reckless, risky numbers. Optimal ranges are 50-70 ng/ml. Again, it is best to monitor your Vitamin D levels through a blood test.
When in doubt, always choose optimal over normal or adequate.
In any case, whenever you can, try to get out and enjoy the sun, and if you use sunscreen, make sure it’s natural.
You should also make a point of doing regular breast cancer screening via thermography and/or ultrasound and don’t forget to take your vitamin D!
Offering Breast, Upper Body and Full Body Exams
Contact me to book your thermography appointment today.
Back in November of 2021, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Health and Vitality Coach and host of Own Your Wellness, Julie Ann Meyer, to talk about breast health.
We had quite an interesting conversation, covering several topics related to breast health, such as:
Breast cancer
Dense breasts
Lymphatic drainage
Breast thermography
Environmental estrogens
So, if you want to learn more about breast health, including why thermography offers the earliest detection of breast health-related issues, factors that are linked to breast health problems, and how to maintain the health of your breasts, then you’ve got to watch this video.
Interested in learning more about breast health and thermography, including the healthcare decisions you can make to improve your chances of keeping your breasts healthy? You should read my book, Thermography and the Fibrocystic and Dense Breast.
Once again, we find ourselves in the pinkwashing month of October.
Known as Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this time of year ushers in a flurry of pink ribbons, and the war-like mantra, “Catch it early, save a life and save a breast.”
Yet we still have no cure in sight. Just treatments.
Fortunately, there are options. Women can also consider using infrared imaging or thermography for their breast cancer screening.
This technology can detect very small differences in temperature and “see” the blood vessels in breast tissue.
Density, size, cysts, and other variables do not make any difference.
Whatever the case may be, seeing blood vessels is important because tumors develop new blood vessels to supply nutrients for new growth, whereas lumps without a blood supply are at a much lower risk of being cancerous.
That being said, this test provides early information about breast cancer risk that also allows ample time for lifestyle changes that can further minimize your risk of developing breast cancer.
So, considering this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, let’s focus on true breast health awareness by looking at ways to prevent cancer at the cellular level, such as minimizing our exposure to environmental toxins.
True Breast Health Awareness
I know I’ve addressed this in a previous blog, but it bears repeating that detoxing from foreign estrogens and chemicals is a must for maintaining good health in the long term.
When it comes to breast cancer, the greatest concern is exposure to a group of toxins called endocrine disruptors, which are chemicals and byproducts that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body or cause estrogen to act in a way that isn’t normal.
Using these products in combination with hundreds of other chemicals that we come in contact with on a daily basis may increase the risk of several cancers.
The average adult is exposed to 126 chemicals every day just in their personal care products alone. So, if you want to be healthy, being educated on the latest toxins is a must!
At the same time, it’s just as important to point out how we’re being exposed to these toxins.
Much of our exposure comes from chemicals in household and personal care products, along with food, plastics, air, water, synthetic fabrics, such as polyester, and of course, exposure to ionizing radiation from health care procedures.
Whatever it is you’re being exposed to, make sure to keep this stuff in mind so you can work to minimize the toxins you’re being subjected to in your daily life.
The Connection Between Plastics and Breast Cancer
The connection between plastics and breast cancer was first discovered in 1987 at Tufts Medical School in Boston by research scientists Dr. Ana Soto and Dr. Carlos Sonnenschein.
In the midst of their experiments on cancer cell growth, endocrine-disrupting chemicals leached from plastic test tubes into the researcher’s laboratory experiment, causing a rampant proliferation of breast cancer cells.
In addition, Spanish researchers, Fatima and Nicolas Olea, tested metal food cans that were lined with plastic.
Around 50% of the cans tested were found to be leaching hormone-disrupting chemicals, and the levels of contamination were 27 times more than the amount a Stanford team reported was enough to make breast cancer cells proliferate.
Reportedly, 85% of the food cans in the United States are lined with plastic. Both of these findings were published in Environmental Health Perspectives.
So, if you want to reduce your exposure to these chemicals, make sure to do whatever you can to avoid exposing yourself to plastics, like only purchasing cans that say BPA-free.
Whatever you choose to do, these studies show that plastics are simply not good for us, and this is reflected in the increase in breast cancer that has coincided with the proliferation of plastics. Prior to 1940, breast cancer was relatively rare; today it affects one in eight women.
Now, let’s talk about polyester.
This fabric is soft, smooth, and supple, but it is still made from plastic, and this contributes to our body’s burden in ways that we are just beginning to understand.
For example, polyester is highly flammable, and it’s often treated with a flame retardant, which increases its toxic load.
Now, at this point, many of you are probably thinking that there’s no need to worry, as you’ve lived this long being exposed to these chemicals and haven’t had a problem.
But remember, the human body can only withstand a certain amount of toxins, and those endocrine-disrupting chemicals that don’t seem to bother you could end up affecting you years down the road.
What You Can Do to Reduce Your Risk
A healthy lifestyle, coupled with an effort to minimize your exposure to toxins can help protect your breasts and lower your risk.
At the same time, experts say early detection methods are key, and thermography is the earliest and most effective way of detecting breast cancer without radiation, in tandem with an ultrasound.
Thermography can also identify your levels of estrogen dominance and environmental contaminants, such as xenoestrogens and Bisphenol A (BPA), which attach to the receptor sites of breasts and mimic our natural estrogens.
Estrogens affect breast tissue, showing up as distinct heat patterns that can be seen on thermal imaging. The textbook appearance is one of “leopard spots” or hypervascularization.
Routine hormonal panels do not test for these estrogens, which are linked to the alarming and increasingly common issue seen in thermographic screenings known as fibrocystic breast syndrome AKA estrogen dominance.
With that in mind, if you want to maintain the health of your breasts, you need to know what’s going on with them, and only thermography can provide you with a visual image that can assess the severity of this syndrome.
This can be used as a preventative adjunctive screening for identifying signs of abnormal pathology years before conventional anatomical screenings.
It’s safe, environmentally friendly, radiation-free, and also safe for pregnant or nursing mothers, young dense breasts, fibrocystic breasts, and even implants.
In any case, it’s time for women to take action to reduce their risk, become informed consumers, and make concerted efforts to analyze their environments.
This involves things like reading product labels to avoid purchasing products that could harm you or your family.
You can also work with a holistic healthcare practitioner to detoxify your body.
All things considered, practicing radical self-care is becoming increasingly important, and living in a sea of toxins is not to be ignored. Health is wealth!
That being said, if you want to prioritize the health of your breasts by evaluating and monitoring them on a cellular level, thermographic imaging is your best option.
Did you know that root canals can have untold negative effects on your health?
There is recognition among integrative dentists and physicians that dental health has a tremendous impact on the overall health of the body.
People are slowly discovering the hidden dangers of things like root canals and mercury amalgams as more medical professionals speak out about their dangers.
From what I’ve witnessed as a thermographic technician, and from a medical thermographic perspective, it is becoming more common to see oral inflammation that drains from the oral cavity, down the anterior neck, and into the lymphatic system. In some cases, this can create lymphatic pathways into the breast tissue, as you can see from the image below.
It is important to know that there is a relationship between specific teeth and illness.
In the 1950s, Reinhold Voll, M.D., of Germany discovered that each tooth in the mouth correlates to a specific acupuncture meridian.
Using his electroacupuncture biofeedback technique, he found that if a tooth became infected or diseased, the organ on the same meridian became infected or diseased, as well. The opposite also held true, that dysfunction in an organ could lead to dysfunction in the corresponding tooth.
One of the founding members of the American Association of Endodontists, Dr. George Meinig, D.D.S, F.A.C.D., in his 1993 book, Root Canal Cover-Up, highlights the root canal research of Dr. Weston Price.
In Root Canal Cover-Up, Dr. Meinig said, “The word about the serious side effects of root canal is getting out. The late Dr. Weston Price, D.D.S., M.S., F.A.C.D., former director of Research for the American Dental Association, discovered that root canals had within them bacteria capable of producing many diseases. He made the claim that if teeth that have had root canals are removed from people suffering heart or kidney disease, these diseases will resolve.”
He found that even after rigorous sterilization, implanting these teeth under the skin of over 5000 rabbits resulted in the animal developing the same disease as the person and resulted in the animal dying of that disease within weeks. He observed this over a period of time and coined the term “focal infection.”
Dr. Price’s research was suppressed and buried by a minority of self-interested dentists and physicians who refused to accept his focal infection theory. Most dentists today have never even heard of these 25-year studies.
Most of the time, the bacteria he found were part of the streptococcus family, but he also found staphylococcus, spirochetes, and fungi.
He found that if a patient had more than one root canal-treated tooth, he could actually have different organisms infecting each one of the infected teeth.
That is the reason some people have different ailments from their teeth all at the same time. Infected root canals have a detrimental effect on the immune system, causing a number of different illnesses.
Your dentist may think that the disinfecting treatment he uses during a root canal would cause the death of these bacteria.
This treatment does kill most of the bacteria in the root canal, but Dr. Price found not one of over 100 disinfectants he studied was capable of penetrating the tubules. The same holds true for antibiotics today.
The bacteria do not die off because the root canal filling blocks off their source of nutrients, as the bacteria are capable of mutating and changing their form.
Dr. Price found that the challenge of a changed environment actually caused the organisms to become much stronger and their toxins became much more toxic.
What happens is bacteria escape to other parts of the body through what’s called a focal infection, which is an infection in one part of the body that travels to another part and sets up a new site of infection.
Still, 25-30% of people seem to get along fine with root-canaled teeth for many years without any detrimental effects.
Typically, these are people who had no history of degenerative diseases, and usually had a strong immune system, which was capable of engulfing any bacteria present, preventing them from being sick.
Ask yourself, how good is your immune system and how long will it be able to protect you?
What Dr. Carey O’Rielly, an integrative dentist based in Encinitas, CA, has to say about the immune system is invaluable to know if you have any of the health issues he mentions.
“Price usually recommended avoiding root canal treatment and extracting the tooth if the individual’s immune system is battling one or more degenerative illnesses or chronic diseases. If you have an immune condition like an autoimmune disease, Lyme disease, a heart condition, arthritis, and possibly even cancer you need to be more careful in doing root canals. Basically, any condition that weakens your immune system makes root canals riskier and less likely to succeed. If your body is already dealing with an immune challenge, infected teeth just add more stress to an already taxed immune system, and vice versa. Just because a tooth doesn’t hurt or there is no swelling doesn’t mean it’s OK.
“New technologies have come onto the scene that will change the results possible and improve the health of not only teeth but the patient as well,” he said.
Dr. O’Rielly feels the most ingenious new technology to come onto the market is ozone.
“Ozone effectively and efficiently deals with the problem of residual bacteria in the accessory canals and the dentinal tubules that both Price and Meinig were talking about,” he said.
Biological dentistry stresses the use of non-toxic restoration materials for dental work and focuses on the unrecognized impact that dental toxins and hidden dental infections can have on overall health.
This form of dentistry treats the teeth, jaw, and related structures with specific regard to how the treatment will affect the entire body.
Most biological dentists use advanced technologies, and one visit can reveal much about the current state of your mouth and teeth.
For instance, using medical thermographic imaging, areas of suspected inflammation and infection can be identified because they present as heat. Then, once an area of concern is identified, it needs further investigation and resolution.
Some cases of inflammation have been caused by a low-grade chronic infection, and upon dental correlation, have been attributed to periodontal disease, TMJ dysfunction, dental restorations like amalgams, or treatments such as root canals.
What this shows is that your mouth is a mirror of your health.
If you want to achieve better oral health, you should eat an alkalizing, antioxidant-rich, and anti-inflammatory diet, replace toothpaste and antibacterial/alcohol-based mouthwashes with an oral rinse, and/or toothpaste that nourishes your oral microbiome. And make sure to choose toothpaste without fluoride.
To recap, Dr. Price and Dr. Meinig both spoke about the fact that those who can tolerate root canals tend to have a strong immune system. This is no surprise, as a strong immune system is the key to fighting any illness or disease.
Yours in radiant health! Patricia
P.S. Please watch this documentary on the truth on root canals – it was censored off Netflix.
Tips on Working with Your Doctor for Total Breast Health Care
Patients are always asking me if their doctor will understand their thermography report.
There’s a large spectrum of responses I’ve heard from my patients’ doctors.
Some doctors support thermography so much so, they highly suggest all their patients to have an annual full-body scan. The full-body scan will assess an individual’s current health status by listing any abnormal hot or cold spots throughout the entire body.
Medical thermography is infrared imaging. Ideally, you would use thermography for cancer prevention, but it can also be early cancer detection which could save your life (70% of those who have diagnosed cancers from anatomical testing, could have been found up to 10 years earlier on a thermography scan).
Other doctors have never heard of thermography. Most are somewhere in between.
Here are some tips on working with your doctor:
Let them know we are not looking to replace the traditional tests, only add to them.
Email your report to them and ask for a consult appointment to review your results. A thermologist will compose your thermography report much like how a radiologist will write a report on an X-ray or ultrasound.These reports are meant for your primary care physician to offer you further recommendations based on your results if any are needed.
If you’d like a sample report to review with a Breast Thermography International (BTI), I am happy to discuss it with you or your doctor. Contact me to set up a review.
There is a wide range of suggestions your doctor could give you to improve your next thermography report.
Here are some examples they may recommend:
Change parts of your diet or balance your hormones.
Relieve muscle and joint tension with yoga or other forms of exercise.
Have a chiropractic adjustment.
Meditate with calming music or breath practices, since most diseases can be caused by stress.
Sometimes, although we try our best to live a healthy life, we still may need to reduce toxins with a detox program.
Also your doctor may want to order diagnostics testing from the findings in your report.
These are just some of the many recommendations you and your physician can discuss to work toward a healthier life.
And go ahead and share your thermography report with your family and friends. This might encourage them to include thermography into their own annual health regimen.
Remember, early detection saves lives and prevention is ideal.
I was so thrilled to sit down with Alexis Brink of Jin Shin Institute to talk about one of my favorite topics: breast thermography.
If you haven’t heard of Jin Shin, it’s a Japanese healing art that uses hands to balance the energetic body, mind and spirit. Jin Shin Institute is in New York and offers events, education and healing sessions.
We started with a background on breast thermography, including the fact that it was actually covered by insurance until 1984 and recommended as an adjunct to breast cancer screening.
Breast thermography still is a common screening method in many countries, including Spain, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Canada and India.
While mammography is a word that’s far more well-known, it often leads to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. As a result, many women are getting biopsies who don’t need them—according to the NIH, 80% of biopsies are false positives, meaning they look like cancer but aren’t.
Watch this interview on breast thermography to learn more, including:
What thermography is and how it works.
Why and how mammography can lead to false positives.
Where the estrogens that create inflammation are coming from.
The role that inflammation plays in breast cancer detection.
Whether or not thermography can be used for the whole body.
What your bra might be doing to your body plus some options for big-breasted women!
How a broccoli seed with “innate wisdom” helped a client with vascular issues.
A warm thank you to Alexis for having me on the show!
