Robert Whitfield MD explains why thermography isn't a reliable cancer screening tool. It lacks standardized reporting unlike mammography, and he uses it instead to track inflammation and swollen lymph nodes over time. Mammography and ultrasound remain the proven methods.
Thermography is being touted a lot in my. My patient population as a way to screen for cancer. It's not.
Wait, I. This is very interesting. I've had several guests recently that talked about that instead of mammogram would. So do you disagree?
So the thing. When someone asked me, like, how am I supposed to communicate about it? Like, I have patients coming from all over the United States, and we have a system in place currently with ultrasound and mammogram that I hope is replaced with a. A technology called QT imaging. And that itself will probably set the standard, but it's not been studied and shown because there's this language, it's called birads, and that allows every provider around the country to communicate about what they found. So if you went and got an ultrasound or mammogram, they would say birad, and they would say one through five, and that would characterize, you know, benign to malignant. But thermography doesn't have any kind of standardization like that.
Okay.
And we have thermography in the office, but we're using it really to. To look for areas of inflammation, and then over time, trying to follow the trends to see how that's recovering. Because I'll have people come with swollen lymph nodes and armpit swelling and. And pain in different areas, and sometimes there'll be some really characteristic changes. But in terms of, like, being able to communicate about that from a cancer perspective, I can't. I get asked a lot, but I can't.
