Thermography Radio Broadcast

Host:

When cancer starts to grow cancer has to make its own blood vessels and that creates a change in the heat signature that you put off and that can be picked up by an infrared camera. I was made aware of a Dr. Philip Hoekstra Ph.D. He's a thermologist and president of Thermascan incorporated. They're in Birmingham Michigan, and we've got Dr. Hoekstra on the line, Dr. Hoekstra, how are you doing?

Phil:

Pleasant good evening, I'm doing very well thank you.

Host:

Alright Dr. Hoekstra, I want to get a little information from you about these thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] and so forth and their utility, but first give me a little bit about your educational background.

Phil:

Well, my background is in the medical sciences, in particularly a physiologist; a physiologist studies bodily functions, how things work, in other words, contrast to anatomists who study how the body is put together. Physiology encompasses a broad range of things from neurology to vascular medicine. I've studied many aspects of it, my focus through time has become more towards the diagnostic use of infrared imaging, and a number of applications.

Host:

Ok and that helps us seg into the next question. What is thermology?

Phil:

Well thermology is a relatively new medical science. Basically what it is, is the diagnostic evaluation of infrared images. We're basically studying the emission of infrared, which is a form of heat from the body, and by that there is a number of diagnostic applications. It's used in veterinary medicine for picking up, for instance, joint or neuralgic problems in animals. It's used in chiropractic for muscle tension or some problems with nerve function as well. It's used extensively in neurology for things like nerve entrapments, things like carpal tunnel syndrome, or a nerve entrapment that would take place from a slip disc, something like that. It's used in vascular medicine where it's used to evaluate blood flow through the major arteries of the arms, hands legs and feet, neck and head. One of its big applications though, one of the oldest applications, is as a diagnostic screening for breast disease.

Host:

So how did you happen to get involved in this particular area of physiology?

Phil:

Well, actually I'm the second-generation thermologist. My father was one of the real pioneers in the field back in the 1950's and 60's. And back then this was very much a government, military program used to place infrared sensors into satellites. Back in the era of the cold war, all this was very secret stuff and the satellite programs were used to gain military intelligence. Collectively, we as U.S. citizens, all spent enormous amounts of money developing this technology, and as a spin off, it was found to have a lot of medical applications. There is a great deal of history of studying the importance of heat patterns in medicine, dating back to the days of Hippocrates. He canonized the importance of calore as one of the cardinal signs of disease.

Host:

I think calore means heat, another word for heat. Now the, we've got lots of imaging modalities that are out there. We have X-ray, we've got CAT scan, we've got MRIs, we've got PET scans, we've got ultrasound, why do we need another imaging system out there? What's unique about thermascanning [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] that makes it, um, important for people to know about?

Phil:

Well, it is a very important modality. Not just because I say so, but it's basically able to study the body in a very different way than any other type of diagnostic imaging technique. Unlike X-rays, or ultrasounds, or CAT scans, any sort, which all of those methods are studying the body by its structure. And in many cases you can take X-rays of a person whose living or dead and not be able to tell the difference, but with the thermology, we're studying body function rather than structure and this gives very different information that in many cases is very complimentary to the other types of tests; the anatomically based test, however may not be an advantage for instance for a CAT scan over a flat X-ray for one particular type of problem. There can be an enormous additional piece of information derived by studying the thermal patterns and function.

Host:

Now the PET scans study the physio-biochemistry of the body also. How would the thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] be different from the PET scan?

Phil:

Well that's actually working at kind of a bio-chemical level and thermology is functioning at sort of a tissue, organ level, again different than what the PET scan is doing and one of the most amazing things is the ability to actually watch bodily function take place. For instance there is an enormous difference between the diagnostic power of a regular electrocardiogram and a stress electrocardiogram. Stress electrocardiogram you are actually studying the bodies' adaptive ability and how it responds to, in this case, exercise. And with thermology, we can actually watch the body through adaptive changes to different types of conditions and better understand the nature of what we're studying.

Host:

So, now tell me about your company Thermascan; what is it that you do there?

Phil:

Well, Thermascan is a company that's been around since 1972. We're coming up actually on 35^th anniversary. That will be the 21^st of June and it was the very first free standing, independent, thermology laboratory in the world, that is not affiliated with any particular other companies or hospitals or institutions. And unlike many of my colleges who are for instance, cancer surgeons, or vascular surgeons or neurologists, who use thermology as one of their tools, we focus strictly on the applications of thermology. That's all that we do there. So, basically this kind of focus and intensity along with a lot of utilizations and basically a lot of hard work has made us the best in the world at what we do. And we have been at the forefront of this, basically, from the very beginning.

Host:

Well, I love it when people have the confidence to say that they're the best in the world. Ah, we're going to go ahead and take our first break here, and when we come back, of course, the impetus for this conversation has been information about breast cancer screening so when we come back we're going to start off with the difference between mammograms and thermograms.

Host:

Ok and you're back with Keeping Fit with Dr. Fit and today our special guest is Dr. Philip Hoekstra who's a PhD and a thermologist there in Birmingham, Michigan and he is the president of Thermascan. So tell our listeners, Dr. Hoekstra, what is the difference between a thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] and a mammogram as far as screening for breast cancer?

Phil:

Well there's actually quite a big difference. A mammogram is basically taking a structural picture of the breast tissue by looking for differential absorption of X-ray radiation and a thermogram is an infrared signature of the function of the breast tissue. It's imaging the emission levels and the patterns of heat from the skin. The information is very different between the two. With one you're looking for subtle differences in the density of the tissue. Mammograms for instance, are very good at picking up what is a sign of tissue distress by something called micro calcification. Micro calcification itself is not a direct sign of cancer, but and indirect sign and certain kinds of cancer are very reliable in terms of putting out micro calcifications. With thermology, we're looking at a different feature of breast cancer. We're looking at an abnormal heat signature. We're looking at a hot spot that occurs in breast tissue because of the abnormal delivery of core body temperature blood to a relatively peripheral area, and the fundamentals of that are because of defective blood vessels or abnormally dilated blood vessels.

Host:

So if I can, kind of re-word that, so what a mammogram does is, by putting, something physical, and that is this ionizing radiation into the body; it makes different tissues show up differentially and we can somehow determine when something is different, whether that might be dangerous or not, were as the, uh, with the infrared cameras they're just picking up something that is being put off from the body. So they're not instituting anything from the body.

Phil:

Right. I should have clarified and thank you for doing so. The thermology is a completely passive technology. The bodies' metabolism is our energy source and we're using a passive camera to make these images.

Host:

Ok, so now I mean it sounds like that's fairly sophisticated technology and you say that you guys have been in business for quite a while here. Have there been clinical studies on the safety and advocacy of thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] as there has been on mammography?

Phil:

Absolutely. The studies have been going on for many many years. As a matter of fact, in its earlier, more primitive form, when everybody called it thermography, it was considered no longer experimental and proved by the Food and Drug Administration back in 1971. In our facility we carry on reviews and studies quite frequently and there's been probably something better than 400 studies, clinical studies as well as academic type studies carried on with breast thermology in the past 30 years.

Host:

So a person that is a thermography technician, how does that person get trained?

Phil:

Well The best source of information is from the American Academy of Thermology. The American Academy of Thermology maintains a membership program for technologists and a training program for technologists in this. There are annual courses run by this that provide not only a training but an accreditation. Many of the manufacturers of the cameras also carry on more of a practical hands-on, how to operate the equipment and the software, type of training.

Host:

Now, one the, one of the reasons that the usage of mammograms has fallen off is because of the physical discomfort of taking a mammogram. In order to get a good picture, the breast tissue has to be flattened as much as possible and this can be quite painful. Describe for us what goes on when a woman goes in to get a theramscan.

Phil:

Well, first off you are very correct. Up until about 10 years ago, I believe it was about a twelve-pound compression that was used to flatten the breast for mammography and unfortunately for mammography, that kind of compression is really essential. More recently the pressure has gone up to something like forty two pounds of pressure. And basically, I wouldn't want my tender parts treated that way, but there's no physical contact used with thermography at all. The patient basically stands about 6 to 9 feet away from the camera, and you mentioned earlier, there's no energy of any sort coming out of the camera. The body's metabolic energy is the source for the infrared signature that we look at with the camera. The cameras that we're working with are extremely sophisticated. If it weren't for the military applications, and the applications in engineering, we probably wouldn't have equipment that is this good, but the sensitivity of these cameras is amazing. For your engineers out there, these cameras are able to discern the difference to temperatures to five places of accuracy. That's pretty amazing; that's being able to distinguish two points as being different by one ten-thousandth of a degree centigrade.

Host:

Now like with any technology, you know, I'm sure there are Chevy's out there and are Mercedes, is there a difference in quality, much difference in the quality of the camera equipment that's used for scans?

Phil:

Yes there is. And the difficulty for the medical consumer is it's very hard to tell whether the equipment and the people that they're working with are properly qualified and useful. There are a number of different organizations for instance that are sort of come-lately's in their level of training and professionalism is not what you would want as a consumer or certainly as a physician. The only organization that has an unblemished record of doing quality work all the way along is the American Academy of Thermology. There are industrial grade cameras that are used as a broad number of industrial applications; everything from use at steel mills to looking for bad connections in electrical systems. There are also absolutely superb cameras that are ridiculously expensive that you really have to be a connoisseur to be able to appreciate. But one of the things that consumers should look for is that the facility and the people involved have been trained and certified by the American Academy of Thermology.

Host:

And do they have a website?

Phil:

Yes. Ha, I was wondering how I could fit that one in, thank you. Its uh, called, americanthermology.org. If I could also put in a plug for our own website. Its not, the website isn't very commercial, its more educational than anything else, so I don't feel too bad in doing so. That's thermascan.com.

Host:

thermascan.com, excellent, excellent. Now the organization that does the certification is this American Academy of Thermology, but it sounds like there are some other organizations out there that do certifications also?

Phil:

Yes, sometimes these organizations are linked around a proprietary interest as basically a means of selling cameras to individuals who may not be as qualified as you'd want and in order to be able to sell them cameras they basically put together an organization with the trappings of certification. So you do have to be careful consumer of this type thing. There are people out in the field who really are not doing the kind of work that is to the best grade.

Host:

Now with mammography regardless of the expensiveness or the efficacy of the equipment taking the pictures, the interpretation of those pictures is what really matters when it comes to making the correct diagnosis of whether there is or is not breast cancer or some other disease. In thermography is this the case also, and who would interpret a thermascan?

Phil:

Well, for a quality result, basically you have to have quality in ever step along the way. You can't start off with a poor grade camera and expect the analysis able to make up for the shortcomings of the camera. On the other hand, with a superb camera with high sensitivities, put in the hands of somebody who doesn't know what they are doing, you don't get a good result either. You need quality at each of the steps. And, again, it is a difficult thing for the consumer, or even other physicians to discern this, and that's why you really need to ask a lot of questions of the people who are doing it. Become the educated consumer. And again there is an enormous amount of information on the Internet, some of it good, most of it pretty good as a matter-of-fact, asking those questions and not taking anything short of good answers.

Host:

So now, as a consumer, if I go in to have a scan, do I then decide who does the interpretation, or is the technician already working with someone that he sends the scans to?

Phil:

They probably already have an arrangement with an interpretive service. The analysis of breast thermology, I wish I could say that it was something that is very simple; it's not. It's a very dedicated and pretty involved process. I've been at it for thirty-five years and I have to apply everything I know on each and every study, so it shouldn't be done by somebody who is casual in the field. The same way that you wouldn't go for an involved surgical procedure by somebody who has done one of these before, they think. The facilities usually have a working arrangement with an interpretive service, and it is important for the medical consumer to ask those type of questions about the qualifications of the people doing it, the ability of that type of camera to produce the images of sufficient quality for the proper type of analysis, as well as the credentials of the service offering the interpretation.

Host:

Okay, we're going to go ahead and take our next break here and when we come back, I want you to give us some idea of when we get the results of thermology, what type of things that a person is going to be looking for.

Host:

Ok back with Keeping Fit with Doctor Fit and we've got Dr. Philip Hoekstra with us who is the president of Thermascan there in Birmingham, Michigan. I want to make sure again that we remind everybody about the seminar that's coming up August the eleventh and twelfth [2007]. Dr. Caroline Dean, Julia Ross, Dr. Mark Start, Doug Coffman, and myself will be giving you information on how to put your health in your own hands. And this is some information were offering today also and hopefully we will have someone there at the seminar who is doing the thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography]. So when a person interprets a thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] Dr. Hoekstra tell me what types of things are we looking to get from that thermascan?

Phil:

Well, there's actually a wealth of information from the type, the infrared imaging and we measure the temperatures. We can do that very well with the types of cameras because the modern cameras are something called radiometric. That means that each of the elements in the picture is an actual temperature measurement to five places of accuracy. And working with the right type of software, we're able to use the full measuring capability of the camera. So for instance we look at the temperature differences between different points, different areas, different patterns on the breast. We look for the distribution of those patterns on the breast but also we look at the behavior of those patterns. We make two sets of images and between the two sets of images; typically we ask the woman to put her hands into a basin of cool water, not very cold. This is as traumatic as it gets for us. By having to put the hands in cold water what we do is to give the body an adaptive challenge and what should happen is that all the normal blood vessels should constrict and the temperatures over these patterns that we're looking at should go down. What we've discovered over time is that the basis for these hot patterns related to breast cancer are abnormal blood vessels or blood vessels that are behaving in an abnormal way because of certain chemicals put out uniquely by cancerous tissue. And we find that in those cases the heat patterns don't change or can actually go up when they should go down so this allows us a great deal of discrimination. We can then literally find the needle from the haystack. We can find an abnormal pattern that is behaving abnormally and contrast that from other patterns that might be occurring for other reasons like hormone derangements or inflammation or just because you happen to be built that way. This allows us an ability to pickup the very early signs of breast cancer.

Host:

So I'm picking up a couple of different things the thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] can do there that's very helpful for us. So one thing that we know is that when cancer cells start to proliferate, their metabolism is increased. Cancer cells grow much more rapidly than the normal cells do. Also cancer cells, because of their need for blood and nutrients, like other cells, they start to make their own blood supply. Now your telling us that the thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] can pick up this increase in metabolism that happens with cancer cells but also that the cancer cells have a biochemically and structurally different blood vessel that it makes that the thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] is also able to pick up.

Phil:

Yes. Absolutely, and each of those features is basically adding to the ability to identify, in an objective way, the features of cancer itself. We're looking at something that is a very intimate property related to cancer.

Host:

Now you mentioned the analogy of finding a needle in a haystack, how early of a detection, as compared to mammography, does thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] make in conjunction with breast cancer?

Phil:

Well, it's going to depend on an individual. In some cases cancer is growing very rapidly and other cases it tends to evolve over many, many years, but when we average all that out, typically with thermology, we are spotting signs of breast cancer five to eight years before they are seen with mammography, even under the best of circumstances. The type of blood vessel changes, that we were talking about occur when a cancer exists only as a tumor one sixteenth of an inch in diameter. That translates to pretty small. Contrast that with mammography, which under the best of circumstances, is spotting a tumor when it gets to be about half of an inch in diameter.

Host:

And typically when we find these lesions on mammography, I mean, there are already over a million cells present so here we're kind of finding the boulder in the haystack and many times those cancers have already spread other places so that is a huge, hugely significant piece of information there if we can detect these cancers even earlier because we know that whenever we can detect and treat cancers while they're still confined to one tissue space then our chance for a cure goes way up.

Phil:

Absolutely. The one thing that everybody in the field agrees upon is that finding the disease earlier makes a huge difference in terms of being able to survive it. The difference of being able to detect it in its earliest stages, we call stage one, verses the later stages, are just enormous. The five year survival of stage one cancer is about ninety six percent. Contrast that with stage three disease where the five-year survival is something in the range of fifty five percent.

Host:

Right. Now, when the thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] are used can they also be used in conjunction with traditional imaging modalities?

Phil:

Basically they should be used in conjunction with additional modalities. One of the things we've learned from the experience with mammography is that, it by itself is not sufficient. It certainly has proven itself to be very useful, particularly useful for older women, but mammography, even in the best of circumstances, has a sensitivity of about eighty percent. That means that its detecting the disease eighty percent of the time that its present in the ideal cohort of people, but the specificity, in other words, how many times does it identify the disease, and then prove later on that it was correct is only about twenty percent. Thermology is not perfect either. It has a much better sensitivity. The sensitivity is in the high nineties. A study we conducted in house showed a ninety eight percent sensitivity, which makes it ideal as a screening procedure. Because of the extra limits that we go to in terms of the challenge testing that we do and using the high quality cameras that we do we have a specificity that's about 86%.

Host:

So if I could just interpret for our listeners here, so this high level of sensitivity means that there are fewer times when you're going to be falsely told that you have cancer, as many times happens on the mammograms. Many times people get told they have cancer when they really don't.

Phil:

Yes. And the unfortunate thing is that its usually leading to, not only a lot of personal stress and trauma, but expensive and dangerous invasive procedures.

Host:

Alright. So the people that interpret these scans. What are their qualifications?

Phil:

Well, there are, unfortunately, a lot of people who are interpreting the studies in a casual type of way where there are not dedicated professionals with a proper level of training. And there again, you have to look for somebody who is properly board certified. The American Board of Thermology does the certification procedure for somebody who is serious in the field and has applied them self, taken the necessary type of course work and demonstrated their prowess in the field. The health consumer should look for interpretive service that has people who are certified by the American Board of Thermology. Now that said, there are other organizations that will provide some kind of a certification, but unfortunately that not very meaningful. Many cases their certification is kind of a weekend course. Well that's kind of how it was done 30 and 40 years ago for mammography, so I suppose they have to start somewhere but the American Board of Thermology has been around for better than 25 years and the procedures, the requirements for board certification are quite objective and quite high.

Host:

Are other types of cancer screenings amendable to thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] also?

Phil:

Well. The big application, of course, for cancer is in screening for breast disease. There are other kinds of applications that are currently being explored as well. I believe the National Cancer Institute, or maybe it's the National Institute of Health is conducting a study on using thermology to detect skin melanomas, a very serious type of skin cancer. Theoretically, I think there's a number of different applications that may be very useful, for instance, in terms of a catheter or an endoscope for colon cancers or prostate cancers but, right now those are kind of obscure applications that need a lot more development before they are ready for prime time. The other applications of thermology are for things like nerve disorders or musculoskeletal disorders or circulatory disorders. The neuralgic applications are something that are very well developed. Thermology is the standard for evaluating a condition in neurology called complex regional pain syndrome or prior to that it was known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy or RSD. And these are very serious conditions that need to be diagnosed as early as possible so that the condition doesn't cause serious deterioration in the individual.

Host:

Now the um, clarify for us the physics, simply, of course, of why thermography is not currently appropriate for screening breasts, or rather colon and prostate cancer but it is very useful for screening breast cancer.

Phil:

Well, in some cases it's a matter of development. The use of thermology for certain deep internal organs of the body is not really appropriate from the skin surface because there are a lot of tissues and different types of tissues and barriers, if you will, different types of layers between deep organs and the surface of the body. Breast tissue is quite homogeneous. It basically consists of glands and fat, so the thermal signature is relatively undisturbed as it comes to the surface of the body. If one were to have, for instance, a disorder of the pancreas or of the spleen or of the lungs, that heat signature is going to be diffused by virtue of the depth and the number of tissues it has to pass through, the different types of tissues, blood vessels between that tissue and the surface of the body that are going to conduct away the heat. A lot of things are going to obscure the heat signatures of deeper disease. There has been work using microwave thermography to do this type of thing, but it's still very much in a developmental stage. As far as the application you mentioned, the potential application for prostate or colon, that very much depends on the use of a special endoscope or a catheter that has a long lens on it that would allow the camera to get into these very intimate areas and not simply image the body from the outside, but again the carry away point on this is that, as far as an application for breast disease, it's nothing that's experimental. It's something that is very well developed at this point and it's at a practical level of application.

Host:

Ok. Were going to go ahead and take our last break here, and then we'll come back, we'll finish up talking with Dr. Philip Hoekstra.

Host:

Ok, and you're back with keeping Fit with Dr. Fit, and we're talking with Dr. Philip Hoekstra and he is the president of Thermascan. Now when these images are taken, Dr. Hoekstra, are these static images that are presented or are they moving pictures?

Phil:

Well, actually both. We're making static images that we actually get a live presentation of images onto a monitor. We can select out the particular images that we want at any particular time. Once we can get the patient positioned correctly, and at different times, say before and after the challenge. But, other types of studies that we do, do involve capturing streamed images, basically movies. And with that we can actually watch the dynamic response of a feature through a change, such as a challenge of sorts.

Host:

Now ah, I'm just thinking inside my head here about the utility of these for sinus infections.

Phil:

Oh, sinus infections show up very well, the veritable house on fire.

Host:

Now then somebody we could easily tell then, somebody comes in with headaches, we could tell them whether that was due to sinus infections or whether there was some vascular problem. Would the scans be able to differentiate there?

Phil:

Oh yes, the, theromology actually is a good way of evaluating blood flow through the major arteries of the neck and the head, the carotid arteries. And that can be a basis for headaches, but sinus headaches show up very simply. You see the hot patterns usually just right where it hurts. And you can be quite quantitative about it and determine which of the sinuses are involved and probably, to some extent, just tell how serious is the infection.

Host:

Now you mention carotid arteries, and, uh, I spoke that we're going to have an ultrasonographer here at our seminar and he'll be evaluating intimal thickness is there a utility there for thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] also?

Phil:

Oh absolutely. We can evaluate several very important features of circulation to the head. Of course, as you mentioned earlier, restrictions in blood flow through the carotid arteries are a major risk factor for someone to have a stroke. Thermology can actually spot the restrictions in blood flow, by the cool patterns that occur downstream. In other words, it's a little bit like taking a hose and pinching it, and finding reduced flow though that hose. The areas downstream of that restriction are going to become cooler because it's the arteries that are delivering warming blood to that particular tissue. So what we see are cold patterns that show up in the areas normally receiving perfusion, that is blood flow by those arteries. The area that we evaluate most closely is the area around and above the eyes. These are areas receiving their blood flow from the ophthalmic artery, which is the first branch of the internal carotid artery inside the head, that actually goes along the base of the brain and with this we can evaluate blood flow over a greater length of the internal carotid artery than what is seen with an ultrasound. An ultrasound is very good for evaluating blood flow and picking up restrictions then, in the area of the neck where the common carotid divides into an external carotid and an internal carotid.

Host:

Now so, I could see this then being a possible screening tool for vascular disease, particularly of the head and neck and usually what we find that's happening in the carotid, and, that's also happening in the coronary arteries also.

Phil:

Right.

Host:

Excellent.

Phil:

There is a correlation between restrictions in blood flow, hardening of the arteries where the proper word for it is atherosclerosis of the carotid arteries and the coronary arteries. Additionally, I would remind you that deficiencies in blood flow in the legs are also correlated with problems with coronary artery circulation.

Host:

So, for diabetics this would also be a tool that would be useful?

Phil:

Yes. Diabetics have an added problem of circulation, not only atherosclerosis of the medium caliber arteries, such as the carotid artery, but also what's very important in evaluating diabetic blood flow is microcirculation. The circulation through the very small blood vessels, the type of thing that is not studied very well with ultrasound, or really any other method, and what thermology does is to evaluate microcirculation beautifully.

Host:

Now you talked about this challenge test and what made it have clinical use in the area of cancer, is that cancer cells have an increased ability to produce a particular chemical called nitric oxide, which dilates blood vessels and gives you more of a heat signature. Now with, in vascular disease we see the opposite, so those cells are then, they have a reduced ability to produce nitric oxide. Is that something that the thermascan [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography] could pick up also?

Phil:

Yes. We can often see the area of restriction by the local inflammation and the challenge study is not so important there but a series of static images, looking at the cold patterns are very useful in picking up these signs of restrictions. For instance, when we look at a hand or a foot, what we should see, under healthy conditions, are warm tips at the fingers and toes. This is something that's very rapidly lost with small vessel disease. There are cold patterns that begin to show up very characteristically with progressive vascular disease, the restrictive vascular disease of, oh, we'll call it hardening of the arteries at one end and call it atherosclerosis on the other. You can see a progressive cooling that takes place in the extremities Now physicians are taught to feel different areas of the body for cold patterns, but with the thermograph you can become extremely quantitative about that. You can learn just how cold a pattern is with a tremendous level of sensitivity that's not available simply by touch, and from that you can get a very good estimate as to how great the level of restriction.

Host:

Now, walking into a technician's office that does thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography]; I have mine done; how much would I expect to pay?

Phil:

Well, there is no set price. In our facility in Michigan, I'd say we work pretty cheap, probably cheaper than anybody else that I know. We're just under a hundred dollars and so the more expensive places that I know are in the range of $350. You don't always get what you pay for in that because I think that we're probably doing some of the best work in the world and we're doing it pretty cheaply, but having been in the field for so long, its really hard for me to raise prices on our established clients. It's just a difficult thing.

Host:

Well, Even at $300, that's far and away from the $5,000 for a PET scan.

Phil:

Yes, well, that was my next point. Insurance is picking up the cost for many of these other procedures, so many times the medical consumer is not aware as to what they actually cost, but things like breast MRI, which is a very useful procedure, but is horribly expensive, can run anywhere from three to five thousand dollars. And PET scans can run in the same type of range as well. The typical cost of mammograms is something in the range of 250 to 750 dollars.

Host:

Speaking of mammograms, do you think that mammograms cause cancer?

Phil:

Well, let me defer on that one a little into a study that was done in 1975 where it was concluded that mammography was causing more breast cancer than it was finding, at the current level of radiation. This was something that the National Cancer Institute was pretty reluctant to reveal because, basically it was the only widely available best developed of the systems at the time and there's been a significant improvement that's taken place where the amount of radiation from mammography has been reduced by a factor of ten. And this, of course, is something very good, but there is a fundamental problem using any invasive X-ray technique as a screening procedure because you're repetitively exposing somebody to radiation and the effects of radiation are cumulative through a lifetime. That means the dental X-rays you had as a kid when you weren't being properly shielded from that X-ray and the radiation was being put on to your upper body or, once upon a time, there were fluoroscopes in shoe stores that were beaming large amounts of radiation all through the body. It was only 30 years ago that whole body radiation was being used as a treatment for acne. All of those things, every chest X-ray, every chiropractic spinal X-ray, every exposure to radiation has a cumulative effect on the body and each and every one of them is a damaging event and when enough damage to the cells occurs, cancer is a very common consequence.

Host:

Well we're out of time here, but quickly before you go Dr. Hoekstra, can you tell us where people can go so they can locate a person in their area that does these thermascans [i.e. breast thermography, infrared mammography]?

Phil:

Well, probably the best place is to check with our website or contact the American Academy of Thermology. Ultimately there is a fellow that we've worked with, a splendid fellow, by the name of Dr. Alfred Johnson named Richardson. He has well trained technicians and outstanding equipment and I can tell you that he does first rate work.

Host:

Well that's what we're trying to get for this seminar, uh, thanks a bunch Dr. Hoekstra and we'll be in touch with you.