Archive for February, 2006
Screen Saver!
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
Medical thermography, a system which screens for breast cancer, has just been introduced to Ireland. It’s a system every woman in this country should know about, says Rory Hafford.
A lot of people hate surprises, particularly those that affect the rest of your life. Mary coleman got one such surprise not so long ago… a little report that revealed some pre-cancerous activity in her breast.
Like most women, she panicked a little.
Eventually she found her way to a special clinic in London that was offering a system called medical thermography.
“When I saw the images generated by the screening process, I felt I had got control of my life back again,” says Monaghan woman Mary.
That was about a year ago. At the time, Mary remembers thinking: “we should have a facility like this in Ireland”.
We didn’t, but now we do.
The Irish Centre of Integrated Medicine is based in Naas, Co. Kildare. It specialises in Medical Thermography.
Jean FitzGerald is one of the founders of the Centre, and is a big believer in the preventative potential of this system.
“This is a non-invasive form of breast-screening. It uses an infrared camera to detect early signs of breast cancers, up to 10 years before other procedures,” says Jean.
In effect, it’s a powerful early warning system.
When a cancer is forming it develops its own blood supply to feed its accelerated growth. Doctors call this process ‘malignant angiogenesis’.
Cells start this process a ling time before actually turning cancerous – and that’s the time to get them.
“A tumour must be at least the size of an olive for a mammogram (the standard breast tumour detection approach) to puck up,” says Jean FitzGerald. “but Medical Thermography can pick up tumours when they are as small as a pinhead. And can also determine if a tumour is benign or malignant.”
Mammogram screening is not recommended for women under the age of 50. This is because of the high levels of radiation emitted during the screening. For this reason, Thermography is a very useful alternative and preventative tool for women in their 20s and 30s.
If you would like to know more about the benefits of Medical Thermography, tune into the Sounds Good health radio programme on www.rte.ie/health you can also contact the Irish Centre of Integrated Medicine on 045-883224, or access their website on www.icim.ie.
Rory Hafford edits the RTE.ie multimedia health site at www.rte.ie/health.
Thermography fact file
- Medical Thermography is a non-invasive form of breast screening that uses an infrared camera to detect early signs of breast cancers
- It can do this up to 10 years before other procedures
- The camera takes a thermal image, which shows up areas of tissues abnormalities using thermal readings.
- Although it may sound like a new technology, thermography has been around since the 1950s.
- There are over 8,000 studies on the subject in medical literature.
Get scanned to Beat Cancer before it gets a grip on you
Monday, February 20th, 2006
Jackie Fitzgerald (health writer)
When it comes to good health, taking responsibility for ourselves is vital, and there are times when we all have niggling concerns about the overall state of our body, yet do little or nothing to allay our fears and get ourselves checked out.
If you feel that the time has come for more reassurance and attention than your usual 10-minute check-up in a busy GP’s clinic, then a trip to the Irish Centre of Integrated Medicine in Naas could be just what you need.
With state-of-the art technology, and everything backed up by scientific research, the centre is run by biologist and acupuncturist Felipe Reitz, his wife, homeopath Jean FitzGerald, and Dr Harald Gaier, a Harley Street doctor who practises there twice a week.
The centre adopts a conventional approach, with a medical adviser on hand to take your full health history, and a variety of treatments and pre-diagnostic tools, ranging from general health screening to stomach and breast cancer screening to the high-resolution Nutritional Blood Analysis which can be used to detect dietary abnormalities, maldigestion, leaky gut syndrome or low immune status, for example. (more…)