Thermography for Breast Cancer

This is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. It makes me feel kinda weird though and I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seems celebratory in a way. There's a hype to it that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I'm just in a downer mood but I don't think I ever liked the pink ribbon stuff. Seems too froofy for what I went through and am still going through.

What really set me off was seeing that the local nutrition store is having lecturers come and give talks on hormonal therapy. Remember that I went to a natural doctor and got a thermography and was told by her that I didn't have to worry about my breast? Well, she's going to be one of the speakers. I saw that N.D., H.M.C. (Natural Doctor, Homeopathic Medical Clinician?) 2 years before my tumor was 3/4 the size of my breast.

I told Geoff that I wanted to go to her talk and tell my story. Geoff calmed me down by saying, "would you want her to do that to you while you're giving a talk somewhere to promote your business?" Besides, he told me, if you want to confront her, do it in private and face-to-face.

I know I should talk to her but I would rather not stir up all those feelings again. Stirring up bad feelings is what I've been avoiding all my life. Avoiding negative feelings is my specialty and why I ended up with a stage 3 cancer in the first place. I just didn't want to go there. It wasn't her fault. It was me not listening to myself, not wanting to face what I was fearing.

I think thermography might be good for people with no risk. I don't know. If you read all the natural doctors, it's the test that can detect breast cancer before even the mammogram can. That's one of the reasons why i took the test in the first place - 2 years before I took another one. The first one was done by the N.D. I've been talking about and she told me i had nothing to worry about...I went two years more in denial and then started thinking that maybe because her type of thermo doesn't give the photo, it would be better to get my next one with a doc who does give a photo.

When I got the one with the photo, the results said that maybe there was a cause for concern and maybe I should get a mammogram to really find out what was going on because what it showed was that I had something going on that might turn into cancer... So even then, I wasn't told I may have cancer but only something that looks like it could lead to cancer. So, based on that and as scared as I was to get a mammogram (with all the false positives and radiation), I ended up having to get one anyway. By that time, the docs had never seen a tumor as big as mine. I got the prize for being the most in denial of anyone they'd ever seen... Very embarrassing.

My first mammogram was taken 11 years earlier when they told me I'd have to come back in 6 months to see if the suspicious thing they saw had changed. So I was freaking out for 6 months with a 2 year old baby and then after I got pregnant with my 2nd child, I had to go back & get that 2nd mammogram, PREGNANT. Then when they told me it was nothing to worry about, I was freaked by the false positive and having radiation while pregnant and decided - no more.

So I was turned off to mammograms and didn't do anything other than once in awhile going to a doc to get my breast manually checked. Around the
same time as my first thermography, my doc had told me to get a mammogram, so I went to get a thermogram instead. My doc also told me I might have endometrial cancer and got me to do a biopsy... My head was on that instead of my breasts and the scare of endometrial cancer was another false positive by a doctor.

My head was also telling me that people like Mercola (who sends out natural health info by email) were right and doctors were bad, so I went with thermography...Maybe getting a thermo each year earlier on would have charted changes & have alerted me, but still I needed a
mammogram to confirm it, so why waste all that money when you really need to get a mammogram anyway? I guess you could keep getting thermos until something comes up vaguely suspicious but mine shouldn't even have been vaguely suspicious so that's why I would never recommend them. The 2nd thermography just told me that something was looking like it could lead to something!

I just am so much more leery now about natural medicine...I do both though, natural and traditional - keep my bases covered. But when I read too much of Mercola I get afraid of the traditional medicine. I am still on his list and am getting better at looking at his advice but not taking it as the ultimate truth...traditional practitioners only say that
natural medicine is a waste of money - they don't believe in it. But natural doctors make it out like traditional medicine is dangerous and you should never go down that road. Maybe it is dangerous and toxic, but it is saving lives too and has worked better for me than any natural remedy.

For 10 years, I suffered miserably with just doing all natural stuff & only natural stuff. I think doing both is better, at least it has been better for me and I don't like it when the natural people make you frightened of the traditional stuff. People like me don't get help because of all the fear mongering around traditional stuff.

Then again, maybe most people aren't as gullible as me or as ignorant or as stubborn!