Dr. Joel Aronowitz — BREAST CANCER AWARENESS — 3 Important Tips for Everyone (& How to Properly Do A Self Breast Exam!)
Joel A. Aronowitz: All right, Breast Cancer Awareness Month I want to tell you three quick things about breast care.
Bridget: Okay.
Joel A. Aronowitz: One is that it doesn’t matter if nobody in your family had breast cancer or if everybody in your family had breast cancer. Basically, being a woman who has breast puts you at risk for breast cancer because it’s such a common disease and even men are at risk, but not very high. A very small percentage of breast cancers are in men. So one is to be aware that that’s something that you’re at risk for, and there are some easy schmeesy things to do that greatly reduce your risk of breast cancer, affecting your life adversely.
So number two is if we detect breast cancer early, it’s pretty easy to treat it without disfiguring the breast. And along those lines is to always go to a breast surgeon or a breast center that is on board with doing a high number of nipple sparing mastectomies. The vast majority of breast cancers can be treated with nipple sparing mastectomy so that the shape and the size of the breast is natural and that there aren’t a lot of very unsightly scars and patchwork appearance and distorted shape as a result of the breast cancer surgery.
So you want to ask, well, do you all do nipple sparing mastectomy? Oh, yes, we do them in certain cases where it’s indicated. Well, what percentage of your mastectomies do you do with nipple sparing mastectomy? I think that nipple sparing mastectomy is really the standard. And a woman can have a nipple sparing mastectomy, have her cancer treated very effectively and equally as effectively as any other method, and still have a natural appearance of her breast and not be disfigured for the rest of her life.
Okay, number three. Number three, just to review. One, breast cancer is common. Two, don’t worry, catch it early because you can have a natural breast, natural appearance non-disfigured whether you’re younger, you’re older, you don’t have to live the rest of your life with a disfigured breast just because you had breast cancer. It can be treated very effectively surgically if you go somewhere where nipple sparing mastectomy and other oncoplastic methods are accepted and done commonly.
And third, I just want to review real quick with you a breast self-exam, because it’s one of the best ways that women can pick up a lump in her own breast or even a man can pick up a lump in a woman’s breast, his girlfriend or spouse and I have had many men pick up breast cancer, so for the men watching, this shouldn’t fall on deaf ears.
So the easiest way is when there’s some lotion or you’re in the shower and the breast is lathered up because it’s hard to feel the skin if there’s not something oily to allow you to rub your hand over. In fact, there are some products that are made out of this kind of material, silicone. So that allows you to feel the tissue underneath.
Basically, like using this soft model, you’re trying to feel a little pea, and it’s painless, typically, but just a little lump, like a little jelly bean or little pea in there that persists, doesn’t go away. And even if it’s not growing, if it’s a persistent discrete mass, not just lumpy material, but discrete mass, that’s something that needs to be professionally evaluated. And just like when you’re flossing your teeth or you’re brushing your teeth, you want to go in an orderly way. So it doesn’t really matter if you go up and down or round or whatever, but you basically want to at some point feel all the areas of the breast, all four sides, and then the central breast and right under the nipple.
So those five areas basically up, down, right, left and under the nipple. And you want to do it with something that either soap or lotion on the skin that allows you to rub your hand across and really feel carefully with the fingertips. So breast self-exam, you can get started on that one. And I hope that you have a great Breast Self-Awareness Month. Breast Cancer Self Awareness Month in October. And you hope you have it too.
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