Cancer-detecting scans, imaging offer proactive peace

METRO DETROIT — Whether it’s early detection screenings or following your own intuition on your health, it’s never a bad decision to get checked for cancer.

Cancer screening can come in many ways, from mammograms and blood tests to colonoscopies and biopsies.

Another method, specifically to check for breast cancer, is breast thermography.

Breast thermography is where a digital infrared camera is used to image the breast and can detect changes eight to 10 years prior to what a mammography can find, according to Michele Foxworthy of Anchor Holistic Health.

“It’s different in that it’s reading the heat of the body that’s emitted,” she said. “When there’s suspicious tissues starting to develop, it draws blood to the area to form, say, a tumor or a cyst or whatever might be going on in the breast, and it increases the heat. So it’s a less invasive way to monitor the breast.”

Foxworthy said, as opposed to other procedures to detect possible tumors or masses, a breast thermography allows someone to be more proactive.

“Ultrasounds and mammograms, they’re looking for a mass, which they can find it, but that mass has been there for a while,” she said. “If you can monitor prior to a mass developing … (the woman) can be more proactive and do some lifestyle changes that can help deter any kind of progression that’s going on.”

Early detection can be key for people to find the earliest signs of cancer to prevent its spread.

This is what Ryan Ringold of Bionicc Body Screening tries to help patients with thorough full body screenings.

The body screenings — which are elective and must be paid for out of pocket — scan from the top of an individual’s head to their thigh and look at their major organs and soft tissues.

Ringold said most people who come in for scans are doing them to be proactive and preventative.

“They don’t feel sick. They don’t have (a diagnosis of) cancer. They want to make sure that they don’t have cancer,” he said. “So they’ll come in because they want to make sure they don’t have a tumor on their pancreas that they don’t know about or in their brain or their liver. So these take a really good look at the internal health and give people insights to what’s going on (in) their insides of their body, and hopefully they have excellent health, but in the event that something’s detected like cancer, like a tumor, that they catch it as early as possible so it gives them (an) early detection opportunity.”

As the screenings are elective, they are not ordered by a patient’s doctor and are not a diagnostic test. Ringold said after their report is explained to the patient and if anything is found on a scan, they highly recommend that they go to their physician and work on the best next steps for them and for further evaluation.

“There’s a lot of people that find abnormalities that they didn’t know about, whether they’re life threatening or not,” he said. “Maybe a little bit of a fatty liver, maybe a hernia or arthritis or spinal disc disease or a small aneurysm they didn’t know they had. So hundreds of things can be identified and evaluated through these screenings. Cancer is the biggest concern people have. I mean, that’s like the No. 1 driver of why they’re coming in, but they also want to get a baseline on their health, (to) see if there’s anything else going on they’re not aware of, see if there’s anything that they should be keeping an eye on or monitoring.”

An individual who did get a full body screening with Ringold, who asked not to be identified, found two instances of cancer that were caught early from his scan in the summer of 2024.

The 78-year-old man said the first cancer was a growth detected on his thyroid. He would go on to have his thyroid removed that December. The second was a fatty deposit found in his groin area, though they weren’t sure whether it was just a benign growth.

After going through tests for over a year, the deposit was found to have cancer cells last October.

“It was a low-grade cancer, and it might never cause a problem,” he said. “This is the type of cancer in its particular location and the type of cell … it’s been known to just transform itself into an aggressive, metastasizing form.”

The patient said both of these growths were asymptomatic and that he had no knowledge or symptoms that led to him getting his scan. He just wanted to be proactive with his health.

“I had no idea I had either of them,” he said. “It turns out that when I went to an endocrinologist for the thyroid, he did notice a little swelling there. So he picked up on it, but again, I had no symptoms that I was aware of. I had no symptoms, and I went into this body screening with no symptoms. I had no idea what it might show. I just was getting old and figured I should see if, you know, what it detects.”