Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (72 page)

One of those studies, published in 2002 in the
Journal of the National
Cancer Institute,
followed 260,000 women in Shanghai for five years. Half of the group was trained in BSE and had that training reinforced at work, while the other half had no BSE training and was not encouraged to practice BSE at all. At the end of the study, the women in the BSE group had found more benign breast lumps than the other group, although the breast cancer mortality rate was the same in both groups. The researchers concluded that “women who choose to practice BSE should be informed that its efficacy is nproven and that it may increase their chances of having a benign breast biopsy.”
⁹
The other study, from St. Petersburg in Russia, followed 57,712 women who did BSE and another 64,749 in a control group, reporting similar results.
¹⁰

FIGURE 13: BREAST ANATOMY

Because of studies such as these, many health care organizations have stopped recommending routine BSE, even before the new screening guidelines were announced. For example, the American Cancer Society dropped BSE from their recommendations in 2003. In addition, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and the U.K. National Health Services also no longer recommend routine BSE. On the other hand, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to include BSE in their breast cancer screening guidelines.

Nevertheless, it is women, not their doctors, who find the vast majority of breast abnormalities (not including those picked up on mammograms). And in women who are at high risk for breast cancer, BSE has been shown to be as accurate as mammography and MRI at detecting new breast cancers, according to the authors of a study presented at the 2009 American Society of Breast Surgeons annual meeting.

Women’s reluctance to do breast self-exams (even among female nurses and doctors, who are supposed to know better) is rooted in two things: (1) fear about what you’re going to find, and (2) innate inner guidance that knows that making a breast exam into a “search-and-destroy” mission not only is counterproductive but may even be harmful. By the law of attraction, that which we focus on tends to expand. So who in their right mind would consciously approach their breasts every month thinking “cancer”? In fact, studies have shown that that’s exactly what happens. (See below.)

FIGURE 14: BREAST SELF-EXAM

Transforming the Breast Self-Exam

There is a healthy alternative to approaching a monthly self-exam as though you were conducting a mine sweep. You can get to know your breasts in a healthy, loving way that enhances your health on all levels. A good time to change how you think about and do your breast exams is right after you’ve had a normal exam with your health care practitioner and you know that everything is currently normal. If you don’t know what normal feels like, here’s what to do. When having your breasts examined by your doctor, ask her (or him) to tell you exactly what she is feeling. Then repeat the exam yourself so you know what normal feels like in your breasts. From then on, whenever you touch your breasts, do so with loving kindness. Rub your hands together until they are warm. Then cover your breasts with them, visualizing your hands transferring love and care to your breasts. You may well feel a tingling in your breasts from increased circulation when you do this.

Approach your breasts with respect. If you are currently afraid of your breasts and find them “too lumpy,” start changing your attitude toward them by paying special attention to them during your daily bath or shower. (You can also address the lumps by following the Program to Promote Healthy Breast Tissue in this chapter, page 352.) When you wash this area of your body, pay attention to how the skin feels under your fingers. Imagine that you have healing power in your hands (which you actually do). As you wash your breasts and under your arms, do so in the spirit of blessing this area of your body. As you do so, you will be learning the basic contours and feel of your own breasts. Do this daily as part of your bathing until you have reclaimed some respect for your breasts as an important part of your anatomy. Your breast tissue will respond positively to your in tent!

Once you are completely comfortable with this exercise, proceed with learning how your breast tissue feels when you use deeper pres sure. You might approach this step in a spirit of curiosity, the same way you might examine your own hand or the sole of your foot. Your breasts are a vital part of your woman’s wisdom, and you want to learn to listen to them. Lie on your back with one hand behind your head. This will flatten your breast tissue against your chest wall and make it easier for you to feel and appreciate your breast tissue as it lies on top of the underlying muscles and ribs. With your right hand, using the flat part of your fingers, not your fingertips, explore your left breast. Fingertips are so sensitive that they pick up the little ductules. You may find this frightening until you know what is normal for you, so use your fingertips to explore your breast tissue only after you have become completely comfortable with your breast anatomy and trust yourself. Repeat the exercise, using your left hand to explore your right breast. It is initially helpful to divide your breast into four quadrants and examine each one separately. Then move up to your armpit and back to your nipple so that you can feel the differences in the different breast areas. Breast tissue tends to be the densest in the upper, outer quadrants of the breast. Eventually you will be able to feel the difference between this area and others and to know that these differences are all normal for you.

You can get to know your breasts by understanding their anatomy, feeling your breasts (both from within and without), and looking at them. Your breasts are a normal part of the body and they deserve as much or more loving attention as your hair or complexion. If you approach your breasts in this way, to get to know them, to consciously and lovingly care for them (and
not
just find lumps), you’ll be surrounding them with a much more positive energy field than the usual energy engendered by the breast self-exam, in which you examine to find what you don’t want to find. Examining your breasts in a spirit of fear simply increases the fear and is the opposite of what you need to create healthy breast tissue. One of my former patients who had had a lumpectomy for breast cancer embodied this healthy way of examining her breasts. She felt her breasts regularly and knew their anatomy well. And every morning, before she got up, she said to them, “Girls, you’re safe with me!”

I have another patient who said she liked to visualize the Divine Mother blessing her and her breasts when she touched them. She told me, “It always helps me feel better and dispels my fear.”

M
ONTHLY
S
ELF
-N
URTURING
B
REAST
M
ASSAGE
R
ITUAL

Here’s a monthly self-care breast massage ritual in which you consciously create breast health. This massage assists the lymph system in removing toxins and impurities from your body tissue because the stroking accelerates the transportation of those impurities to the lymph nodes for processing. (Note: Do not do this ritual if you have been recently diagnosed with breast cancer that hasn’t been treated yet, because it may increase tumor spread.)

Before you begin, put on your favorite music (I like anything by Jim Brickman or Enya) and scent the bath with rose or lavender aromatherapy oil (rose helps dissipate anger, and lavender is very calming). If you don’t like baths, use your favorite scented massage oil. Use a light touch, moving the skin instead of massaging the muscles. Enjoy the sensual nature of touch as you do this. The more pleasure you feel, the more healthful the exercise.

1.
With the first three fingers of your right hand, find the hollow spot above your left collarbone. Lightly stretch this skin, stroking from your shoulders toward your neck. Repeat five to ten times.

2.
With the fingers of your right hand held very flat, cover the hairy part of your left armpit and stretch the skin upward five to ten times.

3.
Keeping the fingers of your right hand flat, lightly stroke or pet the skin from the breastbone to the armpit. Do this above the breast, over the breast, and below the breast, repeating each path five to ten times.

4.
Finally, with the fingers of your right hand still held flat, lightly stroke your left side from your waist up to your armpit, repeating five to ten times.

Now change hands and massage the right side of your chest.

BENIGN BREAST SYMPTOMS:
BREAST PAIN, LUMPS, CYSTS, AND NIPPLE DISCHARGE

The most common reason women seek medical consultation for breast symptoms is breast lumps or cysts. Though most of them are benign, these must be closely monitored to make sure that they are not cancerous. (Nipple discharge is a less-common symptom but can still be cause for concern.)

Approximately half of all women who go to doctors go because they have some kind of pain in their breasts. Cyclic mastalgia, or breast pain that comes and goes depending on the menstrual cycle, is usually caused by suboptimal iodine levels, excess hormonal stimulation of the breast from hyperestrogenism, excessive caffeine intake, or even chronic stress. It is
not
a risk factor for breast cancer.

“Fibrocystic Breast Disease”

Currently about 70 percent of women have been told by a health care provider that they have “fibrocystic breast disease.” In the 1970s and early 1980s a few studies seemed to indicate that women with so-called fibrocystic breast disease had a two to three times higher in cidence of breast cancer. A panic ensued, and women were told conflicting stories by different doctors. When the National Cancer Association Consensus Committee investigated the issue in 1985, it discovered that 70 to 80 percent of what is called fibrocystic breast disease is actually normal changes in breast anatomy and is
not
associated with an in crease in breast cancer. Yet many women still believe it is.

Breasts are composed of fat and connective tissue. Over time, the ratio of connective tissue to fat changes. It is therefore normal for some areas of the breast to be denser on examination than others—breast tissue is not homogeneous. One area may be denser than another simply because there’s more connective tissue in that area than another. Most women normally undergo what pathologists call fibrocystic changes in their breasts, so the chance of finding them on a biopsy is very high. Unfortunately, because the term has been used to describe just about any breast thickening, tenderness, or other symptoms, women whose breast tissue is merely dense with connective tissue are sometimes given the diagnosis of fibrocystic breast disease, as are those who simply have variations in tissue density throughout their breasts, all of which are normal.

Like the term “cervical erosion,” which simply pathologizes a normal change in the cervix, “fibrocystic breast disease” is basically not a disease. I think the term should be discarded.
¹¹
Misinformation about fibrocys tic disease, the constant media exploitation of women’s breasts, and our culture’s ambivalence toward breasts set up a psychological dy namic that is loaded with potential harm for many women. Not only are they made to feel that their breasts are too small, too large, or the wrong shape, but now they are told by someone whom they trust that their breasts have a disease!

Nipple Discharge

Nipple discharge most often happens after nipple stimulation, usually from lovemaking. It is not dangerous. After a woman nurses a baby, it may take a year or more for milk discharge to disappear completely. In cases of persistent nipple discharge that are not associated with nipple stimulation— the discharge can be anything from milky to greenish clear fluid—a blood test to measure the hormone prolactin should be done to be certain that the woman doesn’t have a rare pituitary tumor known as a pituitary microade-noma. A bloody discharge should always be investigated to be certain there’s no cancer. Sometimes, however, this very rare condition is caused by benign growths in the ductal tissue of the nipple.