Women should regularly check their breasts for changes, but can do so in a way that feels natural for them. In other words, you don’t have to do it on the same day each month, or using any particular pattern. Simply be aware of what’s normal for you so you can recognize anything out of the ordinary. What should you keep an eye out for?

• A new lump or hard knot found in your breast or armpit
• Dimpling, puckering or indention in your breast or nipple
• Change in the size, shape or symmetry of your breast
• Swelling or thickening of the breast
• Redness or scaliness of the nipple or breast skin
• Nipple discharge, especially any that is bloody, clear and sticky, dark or occurs without squeezing your nipple
• Changes in your nipple such as tenderness, pain, turning or drawing inward, or pointing in a new direction
• Any suspicious changes in your breasts

Safe Screening Methods: The Benefits of Thermography

If one or more of these changes occur in your breast, the option for breast screening that is most highly recommend is called thermography.

“ … The establishment ignores safe and effective alternatives to mammography, particularly trans illumination with infrared scanning,” Dr. Epstein points out. Dr. Epstein is a professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, and chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, he has been speaking out about the risks of mammography since at least 1992.

Most physicians continue to recommend mammograms for fear of being sued by a woman who develops breast cancer after which he did not advise her to get one. But I encourage you to think for yourself and consider safer, more effective alternatives to mammograms.

Thermographic breast screening is brilliantly simple. It measures the radiation of infrared heat from your body and translates this information into anatomical images. Your normal blood circulation is under the control of your autonomic nervous system, which governs your body functions.

Thermography uses no mechanical pressure or ionizing radiation, and can detect signs of breast cancer years earlier than either mammography or a physical exam.

Mammography cannot detect a tumor until after it has been growing for years and reaches a certain size. Thermography is able to detect the possibility of breast cancer much earlier, because it can image the early stages of angiogenesis (the formation of a direct supply of blood to cancer cells, which is a necessary step before they can grow into tumors of size).

Mercola, Joseph; "Major Confusion on How to Do Breast Checks";  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/08/07/major-confusion-on-how-to-do-breast-checks.aspx