Doctors have long relied on their own hands to detect breast lumps or any other signs that could possibly mean breast cancer. The problem of course, is that doctors are humans, and to err is human. There are the occasional errors and missed breast cancer signs, but this can also be true of breast cancer tests that involved supposedly perfect machines and computers.
Not only that, but many times there are false alarms because women’s breast tissue is not all the same. While one woman may have totally smooth tissue with no fibrous tissue at all that can easily be confused with something cancerous, other women may have very fibrous breasts with a lot of deposits.
This of course can cause a lot of false postives and also a lot of needless fear instilled in the patient. It can be very distressing to get a possible positive reading. I’ve known a lot of women who have gotten this, only to go back and have it biopsied and to find it was really nothing. All the unnecessary worrying!
Of course, what scares most doctors more is not giving false positives or need for concern, but missing lumps all together. That’s why a doctor is developing new techniques and training measures to show doctors how to better use their hands to do breast exams.
Hand breast exams are the ones that every women gets yearly, and it may be in addition to a mammogram. Mammograms are of course more in depth, but they typically do not start until a woman is forty or over, which is what the typical guideline is for most doctors to tell their patients.
This new device can actually teach doctors to do the right techniques to catch the most information with their own hands. The teaching method also includes a dummy doll breast so that the physician can look at the screen and simultaneously perform the exam on the doll while they are being taught.
We all know that hands on experience is the best kind, and the hope is that this type of teaching will really help doctors to perfect their own personal techniques. Who knows, maybe some time in the future, this could even be used to help patients themselves figure out how to give themselves a very effective breast self examination.
