A short YouTube interview in which Robert Whitfield MD contrasts thermography with established breast-imaging methods (mammogram and ultrasound). He states thermography is being promoted as a cancer screening option in some patient communities but cautions it is not an equivalent screening tool because it lacks standardized reporting (BI-RADS) and broad validation. He notes QT imaging is a promising technology that might set a future standard but needs study. In his clinic he uses thermography primarily to detect and follow inflammation and lymph node/armpit swelling over time rather than to make cancer-screening determinations.
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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.
