When it comes to breast cancer, no one is immune. The focus seems to be on women with breast cancer, but recently we shared an article about the relationship of men with breast cancer.

ThermApproach is committed to your breast health. Getting screened on a regular basis is as important to a man’s breast health as it is a woman’s. Male breast cancer is a real cancer and screening with Thermography is safe, pain free, compression free and radiation free and looks at your entire upper body.

Chances are, if you’ve met a man that has had, or does have breast cancer, it can be shocking.  It is what’s known as an ‘orphan disease’. What that means is that it affects fewer than 200,000 people nationwide and is therefore understudied, largely overlooked, and blatantly ignored by the pharmaceutical industry because there is no money to be made in relationship to men with breast cancer.

It’s no secret that the clinical research on the cause and treatment of breast cancer in males is grossly underfunded. After all, an estimated 266,120 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S. this year, and about 41,000 women will die from it in 2018. The odds of a man contracting breast cancer are 1,000 to 1. In fact, statistically, a man is more likely to accidentally drown in any given year than he is to contract cancer in his breast. There are just 2,550 new cases recorded annually in the U.S., and about 480 men die from the disease each year.[1]

Men in general find it difficult to speak up when they find a body part out of whack. Even if they notice symptoms that were presented in the previous article, men simply don’t speak up. Diagnosis and treatment are also unnerving to many men, and guys are far more likely to attribute the symptoms to some other cause. As a result, by the time male breast cancers are discovered, they are often in an advanced stage.

Unfortunately, the information available on cancer of the male breast is scarce, and there are few doctors that routinely check for it. Because there’s not very much historical data to guide the health care community, the typical course of treatment is the same as for women with breast cancer.

What is known, according to the American Cancer Society is this:
“Breast cancer is about 100 times less common among white men than among white women.  It is about 70 times less common among black men than black women. Like black women, black men with breast cancer tend to have a worse prognosis (outlook). For men, the lifetime risk of getting breast cancer is about 1 in 833.”

There are a number of health care professionals who question the effectiveness of many of these treatments, and new research has shown that men do indeed react differently to traditional chemo-therapies.

As a man, it’s important to be proactive with your breast health.  You can begin that process by calling the office at ThermApproach to schedule an upper body screening that not only looks at male breast cancer, but at other areas also such as your head, sinus cavities, TMJ, oral health, thyroid, stroke risk and as well as looking at your heart, back and spine. We utilize sophisticated infrared technology and innovative computer software to capture the images in the form of an infrared thermogram, or heat picture.  All reports are interpreted by medical doctors that are Board Certified in Thermology. 

Before you can feel it, thermal imaging can see it. 

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[1] “Key Statistics for Breast Cancer in Men.” American Cancer Society, 28 Apr. 2018, www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer-in-men/about/key-statistics.html.