10 Tips for Breast Health

10 Tips for Breast Health

For a long time, it has been believed that systematic detection could reduce it, a fact that would justify massive early detection campaigns. Early detection causes significant collateral damage that nullifies the benefit and even ultimately leads to an increased risk of dying from cancer or heart disease in healthy women who undergo it. The goal of early cancer detection is to discover small cancerous foci in the breast, microtumors that cannot be seen with the naked eye or felt by palpation. However, not all of these cancer cells are dangerous. Most disappear spontaneously.

This overdiagnosis triggers an entire protocol of unnecessary treatment in healthy women: lumpectomy (surgical removal) or even mastectomy (breast amputation), radiation (radiotherapy), chemotherapy… with all that it entails in terms of pain, risks, side effects (increased risk of death from cancer or heart disease), and psychological trauma. In many cases, in vain. Early detection and the consequent treatment have not led to a decrease in severe cases of cancer or deaths from this cause.

This opinion also coincides with the studies and experience of Dr. Christiane Northrup, in Early Disease Detection as a Form of Health Care. Conventional medicine, with its focus on diagnosing and treating diseases, has the side effect of turning everything into a “disease” that needs treatment. According to Dr. Northrup: During my residency as an obstetrician-gynecologist, I saw a couple of things. One, a woman’s body was treated as if a disease were about to present itself. Pregnancy was a disease. A normal labor and birth were considered a retrospective diagnosis… Breasts are treated as two pre-malignant lesions sitting on the chest. The whole debate about women’s health is, ‘What can go wrong?’ … We consider that women’s health lies in disease detection. We think that women’s health lies in Pap smears and mammograms… But that does not nourish the cells with the nutrients, thoughts, and emotions they need in order to continue reproducing themselves in a healthy way. The body completely renews itself every seven years. It renews itself in a healthy way, depending on what it is being fed at all levels.

Mammograms Can Turn a Healthy Woman into a Cancer Patient

Dr. Northrup even calls 3D tomosynthesis, the new mammography option: “a better rat trap.” “My position is based on the work of Gilbert Welch from Dartmouth. I believe it is the most important paper that has emerged about breast cancer in almost my entire career. Gil wrote a book called: “Should I Get Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not, and Here’s Why.” Also in medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, there is opposition to radiation and it describes it in ‘The Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast Cancer Incidents’ (the effect of three decades of mammographic screening on breast cancer incidents). The medical journal states: “with the assumption of a constant underlying disease burden, it was expected that only eight of the 122 additional cases of early-stage cancer diagnosed would progress to advanced disease. Gilbert Welch noted in a study of women who died in car accidents in the 1940s, the study was based on sectioning breast tissues and found that 40% of them—of healthy normal women who died in car accidents—had evidence of ductal carcinoma in situ that was never going to appear. Dr. Northrup says that this is the great dilemma”

Many Cases of Cancer Cure Themselves…

Dr. Northrup says: “Of course, this makes a lot of sense, because your immune system is set up to recognize and destroy cancer in the right environment,”  “The right environment, of course, is enough sleep, a low glycemic index diet, sufficient vitamin D, and also, regular monitoring of resentment, anger, sadness, and loss. I think what I want women to know is that their breasts are not two possibly pre-cancerous lesions sitting on their chest. The problem with our paradigm—whether it is treated through tomosynthesis or mammograms—is that it will find things that were never going to appear.

According to Dr. Northrup, women who tend to be at higher risk for breast cancer are those who have difficulty nourishing themselves and obtaining satisfaction… “The first thing to understand is that you have to learn to receive—how to receive rest, how to receive pleasure—and this is important. This is the biggest obstacle for women: we are very afraid of seeming selfish.

This is what we do to obtain the nutrients of satisfaction and receive what we all need for optimal brain health—the beta-endorphin or the feel-good chemicals in the brain: we obtain them through alcohol and sugar, when we can get them directly through self-love, meditation, exercising, and good quality in sexual relationships, which she can do herself.” So, how can one love when one does not feel worthy of being loved? Simply meditate or use the mantra: “I don’t feel worthy of being loved, so for that, I am going to love myself.” The doctor practices a form of energy psychology known as Emotional Freedom Techniques, which also use the affirmation of loving and unconditionally accepting oneself.

According to Dr. Northrup, part of this healing is due to an increased amount of nitric oxide, which is found in high levels in the nasal pharynx. This is one of the reasons why you should breathe through your nose (as opposed to breathing through your mouth). “Think about what happens when you do. You get a greater amount of nitric oxide in every blood vessel in the body. And remember:… A capillary is one micron away from every cell in the body. Nitric oxide is produced by the endothelial lining of all blood vessels in the body… It has increased in all aspects of health: self-love, aerobic exercise, antioxidants, vitamins, eating a diet rich in vegetables. Nitric oxide is the molecule of life force. It also instantly balances all neurotransmitters—serotonin, dopamine, beta-endorphin, and all those elements for which one in ten people in the United States takes antidepressants.”

The 10 Most Important Tips from Dr. Northrup for Women’s Health

Dr. Northrup shares her top 10 tips for women’s health:

1.Get enough sleep: Sleeping well is essential for optimal health and helps metabolize stress hormones better than any other known entity.

2.Meditate for at least 3 to 12 minutes a day, to calm and soothe your mind.

3.Start the day with a positive affirmation.

4.Exercise regularly. Ideally, aim for a comprehensive program that includes high-intensity exercises and resistance training, along with core exercises and stretching.

5.Breathe correctly. When you inhale and exhale fully through your nose, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system to rest and restore, which expands the lower lobes of the lungs, and thus connects with the vagus nerves. “Relax the back of your throat. Since many women have thyroid problems—it is due to chronic tension in that area; because they are very sure that their female voices will not be heard. They have not been heard for 5,000 years. You are not alone. You are now being heard,” she says.

6.Practice self-love and unconditional acceptance. Dr. Northrup suggests looking in the mirror at least once a day and saying: ‘I love you. I really love you.’ “After 21 days, something will happen to you. You will see a part of yourself that gives you a retrospective look, and you begin to believe.” I love you. I really love you.”

7.Optimize your vitamin D levels. Have your vitamin D level checked. Ideally, your levels should be within the therapeutic range of 50 to 70 ng/ml. According to Dr. Northrup:   “The sun is not the enemy. The lack of antioxidants in your diet is the enemy. Natural light is a precious source of vitamin D; you cannot overdose on it. However, many people—to achieve their optimal vitamin D levels—will need 5,000 to 10,000 IU per day. Therefore, vitamin D is important. You can have your level traced through MyMedLab.com, without a doctor’s prescription.” Just remember that if you take high doses of vitamin D orally, it is also necessary to increase your intake of vitamin K2. For more information on this, see my previous article, What You Need to Know About Vitamin K2, D and Calcium (Everything you need to know about vitamin K2, vitamin D, and calcium).

8.Cultivate an active social life; enjoy face-to-face time with like-minded people.

9.Take Epsom salt baths (20 minutes, three times a week) as a simple, low-cost way to get magnesium into your body.

10.Keep a gratitude journal. Every night, before going to bed, write down five things you are grateful for, or five things that gave you satisfaction.   “Remember: Every emotion is associated with a biochemical reality in the body. Therefore, it will show the emotions of generosity, satisfaction, reception, and an open, kind heart. The same things that create heart health create breast health.”

How to Perform Breast Self-Exams

Naturally, I couldn’t talk about women’s breast health with Dr. Northrup without getting her opinion on breast self-exams. Surprisingly, research has shown that self-exams may be overrated, just like mammograms, in terms of saving women’s lives. “There was a large study conducted in China, which showed that teaching women how to examine their breasts did not decrease their mortality at all,” she says. “In fact, all it did was increase the number of biopsies to look for benign disease. Therefore, there is no data that breast self-exams help with anything.” That said, a “self-loving breast massage” is still encouraged and recommended monthly or weekly, but not to specifically look for something, or with the hope of finding something wrong. Instead, it is suggested to simply massage your breasts and under the armpit, where the lymph nodes are located, while taking your Epsom salt bath. The best time to do this is just after your period, when you have the least hormonal stimulation. “Massage them with love. Don’t be looking for anything,” she says. “The average woman will find something. We know that self-breast exams, or simply that a woman finds something, because she knows her breasts, this is as good as all these other screening tests looking for fast-growing tumors. See, the problem with tests is that they find slow-growing tumors, which might regress or might not develop anyway.

Therefore, on one hand for your health, you will start the practice of accepting the breasts on your chest. Know them lovingly in terms of health. By the way, do not use your fingers, use the palms of your hands. Otherwise, you will feel every little gland and get scared. And then, if you find that you have what is called fibrocystic disease where the breasts become soft, start taking some seaweed pills, because iodine actually helps greatly.”

Taking Control of Your Health is the Best Form of Prevention

The advice offered in this article is from Dr. Northrup. There are many additional strategies to help prevent cancer, particularly breast cancer. One of the most important lifestyle changes you can make is to adopt a low glycemic index diet and avoid sugar in all its forms, especially fructose. Excess sugar increases insulin levels, which, along with high blood sugar levels, changes the way estrogens are metabolized in the body. Elevated estrogen levels are a risk factor for breast cancer, so you will avoid estrogen dominance. If you are experiencing excessive menopausal symptoms, you may instead consider bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, which uses hormones that are molecularly identical to those produced by the body and do not wreak havoc on your system. This is a much safer alternative. I agree with Dr. Northrup that ultimately, health is about living well while you are alive, and putting a lot of effort into detecting cancer that can turn you into a patient when you are not really sick…

Cancer testing does not represent prevention, and while early detection of cancer is desirable, the conventional recommendation for regular mammograms has proven to be more harmful than helpful. Remember that 10 times more women are harmed in some way compared to those whose lives are saved by annual mammograms. So, educate yourself about your options, and embrace your body, your life, and your health; focusing on a healthy life, as opposed to the search for that “something” invasive that could someday kill you.