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Transcript
- 01:54 Detox Tip of the Day
- 03:09 About Dr. Kevin Kelly
- 05:31 Ultrasounds versus Mammograms
- 11:06 SonoCine
- 14:56 Benefits of the SonoCine Scan
- 19:08 SonoCine versus Mammogram
- 22:15 Fatty versus Dense Breast Tissues
- 23:31 Radiation Risks
- 23:55 Acceptance in the Medical Establishment
- 32:51 Insurance Coverage and Costs
- 35:08 Where to get a SonoCine Scan in the US
- 42:33 Thermography
- 48:23 Final Thoughts from Dr. Kevin Kelly
- 52:10 Signs of Breast Cancer
- 58:32 Where to find Dr. Kelly and the SonoCine Technology
Wendy Myers: Hello. My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can find me at myersdetox.com, and you can learn all about my detox program at MineralPower.com.
Today, we have a very important show about alternatives to mammogram. Dr. Kevin Kelly performed the SonoCine breast scan on me. It’s like an ultrasound movie that can detect cancers at very small sizes, 5 millimeters, which is about half the size that you can detect a tumor on a mammogram.
It’s also very important to note that if you have breast implants or if you have dense breast tissue, which includes about 40% to 50% of women, a mammogram can’t see through that. A mammogram is ultimately going to be ineffective at determining if you have breast cancer.
So I was very, very thrilled to meet Dr. Kevin Kelly, and got a scan myself, and found that I was cancer-free. I’m very, very happy about that. Hopefully, I would be since I do infrared saunas all the time and detox. That’s why I better be cancer-free. But this shows it’s very, very important, and Dr. Kevin Kelly saves women’s lives. I’m very honored to bring this information to you.
Please keep in mind that this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult your health care practitioner before doing anything that we suggest today on the show.
Wendy Myers: For each podcast, we’re doing a little detox fact to teach you guys about detoxification and toxic metals. Today, I want to talk about aluminum. There’s a lot of buzz on the blogosphere that aluminum causes breast cancer because it’s found in breast tissues, but correlation does not mean causation.
We slather on toxic deodorant that’s full of aluminum onto our underarms every day, and many of us for years and years and years. So obviously that aluminum that we’re putting on that area will diffuse into our skin and into the local tissues.
I personally believe aluminum is not one of the causes or factors of cancers even though that breast […] can be full of aluminum.
So any deodorant that you’re using from the store or the drugstore or grocery store, those all contain aluminum. You have to use a natural, aluminum-free deodorant. Even the crystal that contains aluminum. That’s why it works because it actually just contains aluminum.
So definitely be careful in your choice of deodorants.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today is Dr. Kevin Kelly. He’s the Medical Director of the Breast Ultrasound Center in Pasadena, California, and has been in private practice as a diagnostic radiologist for 34 years. He was director of Breast Imaging at Huntington Memorial Hospital and the Hill Breast Center, renamed Huntington Hill Breast Center, in Pasadena for 20 years.
Dr. Kelly is one of the country’s leading authorities on ultrasound to detect cancers on women with dense breast tissue and/or implants. Since 1993 he has been conducting clinical research on the discovery and characterization of breast cancer by ultrasound, and in 1997, began his journey to develop the SonoCine AWBUS exam.
So you can learn more about that at SonoCine.com, and find Dr. Kelly at KevinKellyMD.com.
Dr. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, thank you for inviting me, Wendy. This is a real opportunity to talk to all the women out there and let them know exactly what’s going on with ultrasound and mammography.
Wendy Myers: I think it’s a really, really important show because there are millions of women out there getting mammography and it does not work for them if they have dense breast tissue or, like myself, I’ve got breast implants when I was 19. I had poor decision-making skills, and so mammography is not going to work for me. I’ve had three friends of mine whose implants were ruptured. Just three friends in my friend population, I know three people that have had problems with mammography, and it will not detect cancers because the mammogram machine cannot see through implants.
So I was very honored that you gave me a SonoCine breast scan, and not only found that I was cancer-free, but that I had a leaking implant. So that I’m currently seeking a surgeon to correct that, but for me, it was very profound to find that.
So thank you very much for finding that issue.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, you were certainly welcome. Ultrasound really is the way to look at implants. But let me explain a little bit about how mammograms and ultrasound differ. When you have any sort of x-ray, you have to look through the entire thing to see anything. It’s like standing in front of a little forest and wondering, “I wonder if there’s a bear in that forest. But I don’t want to go in there and find out.”
If it’s December, there are no leaves on the trees and you can see all the way through the forest. And sure enough, maybe there’s a bear on the next hill over there.
If it’s summer, there are leaves on the trees, and that’s an equivalent of dense breast. So that you can’t see through the forest because, in the forest’s case, it’s the leaves that are in the way, and in the mammogram’s, it’s the issue that’s in the way. The tissue covers that cancer, so you can’t see it.
And there is not much way around that. As far as the implants go, it’s like looking at this forest, and there’s a mountain in the middle of it, which is the implant because you can’t see through the implant, and you can’t get around the implant. You can walk around the mountain a little bit, but you just can’t really see well.
And mammograms, by their very nature, you have to thin the breast out as much as you can. So when you push out on the implant. In the relatively old days, when the capsules were thin, sometimes they would rupture. Sometimes, even now with saline implants, if you put too much pressure on there, there’s a valve where they put the saline into the implants. Saline is just salt water. They’re not going to hurt you.
But you can sometimes cause a slow leak that may take a few months to end up with a flat tire.
And so I would tell your audience to, if you have saline implants, be very, very careful, and don’t push real hard here, if you’re going to do a mammogram.
Now, an ultrasound is done from the skin looking in. The first rule of breast cancer is that it occurs in the breast. And all of the implants are either behind the breast or behind the breast and the muscle. So they don’t get in the way. It’s like looking at what’s on the table, and it doesn’t have to be a glass table because you don’t care about the table. What you care about is what’s above the table.
And so ultrasound is very good at that because it looks in from the skin down.
And so for implants, this is really important. For dense breast, this is really important because dense breasts obscure the contents of the breast. And it’s like a slide and scale. You can see some of the bigger cancers, but you’re going to miss the little cancers. And what’s important, they talk about, “Well, we found this cancer by mammography.” And you say, “Well, how big was it?”
“Well, it’s two centimeters.”
And you say, “Well, that’s pretty big. That’s almost an inch.”
What you want to do is you want to find the cancer when it’s really small, and that’s what the Pap smear did. When I was in medical school, women feared cervical cancer more than they feared breast cancer because they couldn’t find it early. And this guy by the name of Papanicolaou, hence the Pap smear, he figured this out and figured out how to scrape cells onto a slide early, and find this cancer early.
And so now, women who are in their 30’s and 40’s, they don’t even think about cervical cancer. They don’t even think much about, “Why am I doing this Pap smear?” They just know they’re supposed to do it because they’ve never met anybody who’s died of cervical cancer.
If we can find equivalently cancers that small in the breast, a generation from now, those women, will go in and get an ultrasound, and not even think about it.
Wendy Myers: Yes, because with your invention, SonoCine, there is no reason for women to die of breast cancer now because it finds the tumor so small.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t we talk specifically and tell the audience what is SonoCine and why did you invent it.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: This was 20 years ago. I had learned a little bit of ultrasound in Europe, and came back. I had a very busy practice. I’ve been a breast radiology for 30 years. It dawned on me that if I could see a cancer on a mammogram or feel a cancer in the woman, 100% of the time I could see that cancer with ultrasound. And that wasn’t true the other way around. I can feel some cancers and they didn’t show up on mammograms, and I could see some on mammograms that I couldn’t feel. But instead to me, I ought to be able to screen with this because breasts aren’t the size of Texas. If I don’t know where it is, I should have a way of looking at it, so that I would see it.
And at the time, women, what they were doing was hand scanning, which in this country usually a technologist runs across the probe along the breast, and that works. And a lot of times, you’ll find very small cancers. But the thing is, it doesn’t work all the time, and part of it is that when you’re doing the study itself, it takes a certain amount of brain power to do this right. And you’re thinking about what you’re doing rather than thinking entirely about looking for cancers.
It’s somewhat the same as trying to fuzz with your cellphone while you’re driving. Both of those take a certain amount of intelligence and brain power to deal with, and we think we can multitask, and actually, there is no such thing as multitasking.
What we get when we do that is we flip back and forth. We do a little bit of task one, then we’ll do a little bit of task two, there you go.
Wendy Myers: […]
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Yes, and we go back and forth. Every time we go back and forth, we lose a little bit of the knowledge because we don’t get it into our brain enough.
Wendy Myers: Yes, so when the radiologist is doing an ultrasound scan, they’re scanning the breast and trying to look at the same to look for a tumor. It’s not effective.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: It’s a thought process because you’re thinking about what you’re doing rather than what you’re seeing. Some of these cancers are very subtle. If it’s a big cancer, pretty big cancer, they’ll find it. There’s no question. If you had a choice between, if you could only have one thing and you can have a mammogram or a hand scan ultrasound by somebody who knows what they’re doing, take the hand scan ultrasound. It’s most of the way there.
But the reason that it hasn’t been fully accepted is what we’re talking about. That’s why they put you in jail if you have your cell phone and you’re driving. If you can do it most of the time, it’s just most of the time isn’t good enough.
Wendy Myers: So what are the benefits of doing a SonoCine scan? It’s finding cancers smaller than what a mammogram. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: What I tried to do is there is a sweet spot for finding a cancer. And for me that’s 5 to 10 millimeters. And when I first did this study at [some university] about 10 years ago, we tripled the number of cancers right at that size. And so I knew we were on the road to the right fix here.
And if the cancers are smaller than 5 millimeters, and you’re trying to find them, you end up finding a lot of normal things, and you pick out too many things, whereas once at 5 to 10 millimeters, you can find the cancer and there is a study that just came out from Holland that they looked at 173,000 women who have breast cancer and divided them up into different groups. This was a survival study where we’re trying to figure out what kind of cancer, how big of a cancer that you would survive and how long.
And so they had 17,000 that were 10 millimeters or less, and 10 millimeters or a little less than half an inch, and they figured out over 15 years what the survival curve for those women was, and then they took the women who had died, who didn’t have breast cancer, and they age-matched it. The curve superimposed pretty much, 1% difference maybe, but what that said is if you have a cancer that’s between 5 and 10 millimeters, you will live as long as the woman has never had a cancer.
That’s if you’re living in Holland, which in Holland they care of everybody. So nobody gets left behind and they have very good medicine. And because it hasn’t gotten to the lymph nodes, there’s no chemotherapy. You only need chemotherapy basically if you have cancer in your lymph nodes. And in order to get the cancer in the lymph nodes, it has to grow to a certain size. Usually, at 1 centimeter, 98% chance it’s not in the lymph nodes.
I personally believe that when they’re that small, you can take them out without radiation. There is some evidence also from an article in Europe about this. And if you could do that we would be like a Pap smear that not only don’t you die, it’s not a terrible thing. And the fear of breast cancer would gradually go away over the next 20 years as everybody saw this is how this works.
And we’ve proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m sure as many people know, but does it work? Yes. Are we finding that there are now 50 units out there, and are we finding small cancers, and more importantly, not missing cancers? It’s look like this is working.
Wendy Myers: So your machine, the SonoCine, can detect the cancer as small as 5 millimeters, and a mammogram, the smallest that it can detect is 10 millimeters. Is that correct?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: No, here’s what the problem is. There are times when if you fatty breasts, mammogram will do just as well as the ultrasound because the cancer doesn’t make fat, and that’s what makes it stand out.
You can also have little calcifications in the cancer that will make it stand out in terms of everything. It doesn’t matter what the background is.
But the trouble is that’s only about 15% of the time. So it’s the 85% of the time in the women with the dense breasts that the cancers either get pretty big or about half the time they’re found physically because it’s gotten to be over an inch, and that’s about where you feel the cancer. Or it’s pretty close to an inch and it’s still found on the mammogram.
But the idea is instead of finding it at 25 millimeters, and finding it at 15 to 20 millimeters is better than 25, but it’s not as good as 5 to 10.
Wendy Myers: Yes. The problem is a lot of women are getting mammograms, and their doctors either are withholding the information or just don’t know. They’re ignorant that the mammogram is not going to be that helpful for a dense breast tissue, and women with breast implants.
So I think it’s just really, women need to be made aware of their choices.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: That’s what turned the Pap smear around. It took 30 years from the time Papanicolaou did his first discussion or lecture on the Pap smear, it was in 1928, and that it was the last 50’s by the time it really got out there. And it wasn’t the docs that made it happen. It was women who made it happen because the women, particularly the American Nurses Association said, “Wait a minute, guys. You guys are arguing about this. This is us who are getting this and dying. And so we’re going to do a study on us.”
And they did. And it showed that all of a sudden, nurses weren’t dying from cervical cancers anymore, and everybody went, “Oh, duh.”
Women have to get out there and do this and just demand it. It’s bad enough to have one woman bitching at you, but if you have a million women bitching, they’re going to get something done.
Wendy Myers: About 40% of women have dense breast tissue.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: 40% to 50%.
Wendy Myers: Yes. And so they’re just not going to be helped as much as a woman with fatty breast tissue.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: That is correct. And I used the example of, if you have a woman who has a 3-centimeter cancer in their breast, and she has fatty breasts, the difference between her and the woman who has a 3-centimeter cancer in her breast who has dense breast is the woman who has the fatty breast and the 3-centimeter cancer never got mammograms, whereas the other woman may have gotten mammograms, and often times, has that mammograms.
She’s just tough out of luck, whereas the other one neglected her health, and that was the result of it.
But if you have dense breast and you come up with a 3-centimeter cancer, you’re going to be getting one of these once a year, and just bad luck.
Wendy Myers: And so don’t mammograms expose you to radiation that in turn can promote breast cancer?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: They do expose you to radiation. The question is how great of a risk is it? It is actually a relatively small risk. We do not judge risks very well when they’re small. If we really judge that we wouldn’t play the lotto, when it gets up there to $400-million lotto.
My brother bought me a ticket and said, “Don’t think you’re going to win this because you have 175,000 times the chance of being killed by a vending machine falling on you than you do of winning this lotto.”
We don’t appreciate small risks, and the risks for me of developing a cancer in the breast, as far as we know, and that there’s some […] nailed it down perfectly. I’m in Pasadena, and if a woman had to drive from Pasadena to Long Beach to get a mammogram, she would have more chance of getting killed getting there and getting back than she would from the radiation.
Is there a risk? Yes. Is there a cumulative risk? Yes. If you had seven mammograms, it would be like driving seven times to Long Beach and back. Is it truly a risk? The difference is, you get home from doing your risk when you’re driving, and you’re alive. That’s fine.
When they say accumulation, you don’t experience the results of the risk for about 20 years.
But it’s really small. The big thing is it doesn’t work very well because that’s a big risk. The risk of the radiation is small, but it’s there.
Wendy Myers: So why hasn’t medicine embrace this technology yet? You’ve been working for a number of years trying to get it accepted in the medical establishment. What’s wrong?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: It’s somewhat disruptive. When we did the research, we had 6000 instances of a year where you had a SonoCine and a mammogram separately read, and then looked at it at the end of the year.
So we had 6400, I think, instances like that. Some of the women did it a year and then did it the next year, and the next year.
So when that came out, […] New England Journal of Medicine, which is a very prestigious organization, it got thumbs up, looks pretty good. The editor liked it. The reviewers liked it. And we were down to the pre-flight department where they were saying we don’t want this as a table. We want it as a column. We want this […] Set it up for us.
So that goes along. And then we get to the end of this, or close to the end of it, and they said drop dead. Well, do I know exactly what happened? And then after this, I sent it off to European Radiology, which is the second biggest radiology journal in the world, and it’s accepted it immediately. It’s on their website within a couple of months.
I got a commendation after a year saying this was one of the top two articles for the year for that journal. And they didn’t change much from what was turned down.
Let me explain what happened. It turns out that the New England Journal has one of the universities looking over it, most likely Harvard because Harvard has been there a long time, and so is the New England Journal. There is a thing that’s called 3D mammography or tomonsynthesis. Harvard owns the patents. It’s somewhere around $100-million worth.
So I don’t know what happened exactly, but I think that in a nutshell is a strong example of the economic pressures on here. The rest of the world, Japan, China, the Canada, Mexico, all of South America, all of Europe, they use ultrasound, you can get published articles into the press there. If you own an MRI machine or you own a tomosynthesis, you say, “Well, let’s see. I’ve got this. The other thing might be a little bit better, well, we’ll just let it sit.”
And so this is laying it out. I’m sure this is going to get a lot of crap from a lot of people. But this is basically true, and I’ve spend 30 years trying to get this going. Believe me, I’m 73 in a couple of weeks. This isn’t about making a huge amount of money.
I was 55 when I was figured this out. I knew about Papanicolaou. I knew how much trouble this was going to be. And I thought maybe I don’t have to do this. But then I thought there’s a hundred women who die in a day, and if I walk away from this, how in the hell am I going to live with myself?
You can’t walk away from a burning building and just say, “Well, I don’t want to get home late for dinner.”
And so that’s where it was. The women have to push this otherwise it’s never going to happen. I can’t make it happen. I can make it happen a little bit. We’ve got about 50 of these around the country now. But the reason it really will take off is because it doesn’t have the irregularities of how people do handheld ultrasound. There’s a way to do it. Just like a mammogram, there’s a way to do, there’s a way to look at it, and it works.
And that’s what we needed for this test to work, and this is the size we’re showing. It’s the size you want to get it, 5 to 10 millimeters. And it’s not quite an office procedure, but it sure is not a mastectomy, it’s not chemotherapy […]
Wendy Myers: Yes, and radiation, and you don’t die. You’re not going to die.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Yes, you don’t die. That’s the big one.
Wendy Myers: You’re not going to die from a breast cancer that’s removed 5 to 10 millimeters.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: That’s right. And so women have to say, “This is my fight,” and go after their insurance companies and say, “I demand this. You’re working for me. Get this. Pay for this because you’re going to save money, and I’m going to have to pay $200,000 for chemotherapy. If I get cancer, it’s going to cost you maybe 10 grand to take half of my cancer, maybe do an MRI or two.”
Wendy Myers: So that leads me to another question. Is the SonoCine covered by insurance?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, there is a code for complete breast ultrasound that’s a Medicare code. It currently isn’t paid for all the time. This happened with needle biopsies when they first started needle biopsies. Everybody said, “Oh, there are going to be biopsies and everything, so we’re only going to pay for surgical biopsies. I’m not going to pay for needle biopsies.”
And if the women push the insurance companies, they’ll do it because ultimately, it will save money.
Wendy Myers: How much is a SonoCine exam costs? If you go to your doctor, how much does it costs?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: In my practice because I have a very small practice, for women who come in who want to talk to me and be examined at the time, that’s $350. The ones that come in and just say, “Give me a SonoCine,” and that means I will send you a report and give you a call, it’s $250.
If that’s for me, there are other places that do take insurance because I’m old. I don’t see that many people a day that I can afford to have an insurance specialist in my office. I’ve got two people in the office. And so that’s why I don’t take insurance because you have to hassle the insurance company and I just don’t have the wherewithal to do that.
But there are other places. There are 50 of them around the country. There’s a fair number in Northern California. Barbara Hayden, who is a breast surgeon, who is opening up in Beverly Hills in a couple of weeks, two or three weeks.
Wendy Myers: So you said there are about 50 SonoCine machines around the country. What states? Where are they located?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: There’s a few of them in Northern California. There’s some saddled through the Midwest. You can call the SonoCine in France, SonoCine online, I think they have a thing where you can put your zip code in and it will tell you where the closest one is.
Wendy Myers: Great. So that’s SonoCine.com?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Yes. S-O-N-O-C-I-N-E. It means a sound movie.
Wendy Myers: And I really liked how when I got my exam, there was a nurse practitioner that did the exam. It was totally painless. It was very relaxing. And then I had my consult with you and you reviewed it. There was no interference in the exam and the interpretation. It totally makes sense to me.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: My assistant that’s what she’s doing. She’s making sure that the test is good, and I make sure that the test doesn’t show a cancer. And so I’m able to concentrate on that because I don’t have to think about anything else, just as the stream of images goes by, then I’m looking at it. And cancer helps in this. There’s a nice rolling appearance to me, the tissue that goes by, and a cancer, which means a crab in Latin and its fingers, it sticks out and it grabs a hold of the tissue and it twists it. What’s that?
I’ve had women who have never seen a cancer before. In fact, I was being interviewed earlier and there were two women there, and I was showing them one of these examples. It was a 5-millimeter cancer, and they both saw it. They said, “What was that?”
They had never seen a SonoCine before. They had never seen a cancer. But we were able to see that irregularity that kind of, “That’s wrong. Something went by that’s wrong.”
Wendy Myers: That’s how it is to see a cancer on a SonoCine exam.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Yes. And that’s how it shows up.
Wendy Myers: I really feel for so many women out there because I did a post on Facebook just about my own experience with getting a SonoCine exam, and whoosh, immediately, I had 20 comments. “Where can I get this?” “I knew that my mammogram wasn’t working for me because I had dense breast tissue.”
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Dense breast tissue. […]say that two times in a row.
Wendy Myers: And so women, they know that the mammogram is not the latest cutting edge technology to detect cancer. So I know that women out there are, listening to this, like Dr. Kelly said, demand proper screening because you deserve that. And it’s out there. The technology is out there.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: And demand it of the insurance companies. The insurance companies would like to say, “No.” And now, the U.S. Preventative Task Force, they came out. They’re a government-sponsored board of physicians and mathematicians and statisticians and whatnot, and they have decided not to do any screening under the age of 50.
Now, the insurance company said, “Oh, that’s great. We won’t have to pay for them.”
Now, it will be very difficult for women to get screened with mammograms under the age of 50. The number one cause of death in the United States for women between the ages of 35 and 54 is breast cancer. That’s ahead of everything.
Car accidents, alcoholism, smoking, drinking, driving, all of the things that are lifestyle things, the one disease that’s really there is breast cancer, and this is fixable by finding it early. And it just doesn’t make any sense.
Wendy Myers: Why do you think that task force set that parameter so high, at age 50?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Because that’s when all of the dense breasts, it’s the young women with dense breasts. And a lot of it doesn’t perform very well under the age of 50. And so they say, “They really aren’t performing very well, so we’re not going to pay for it.”
And instead of saying, “Well, that’s not performing very well. Why don’t we get something that works?”
And the something that works is out there. All they have to do is do it.
Wendy Myers: It’s amazing because it’s just another example that if you plan to be healthy, you have to take matters into your own hands and find the tools out there, screening tools and health regimes and supplements and everything that you can get your hands on because the doctors and the insurance companies and the status quo, the medical community, they’re not going to do it for you. They’re not going to take care of you. Only you are going to take care of you.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Although this is beginning to change with the original model was that you’re riding along the path of life on your bicycle. And when you fell in the bushes, then the docs would come and pull you out and try to fix you up and get you back on the bike.
What came really out of the eastern methods is, “Why don’t we teach you how to ride the bike?” And how do you live to have a long life? Rather than saying, “I’ll wait until you fall out of the parameters.” And you have to fix people to fall out of the parameters.
But the core of that should be, “How do I keep you on the straight and narrow?”
As a physician, health care provider, how do you this because that’s what it’s really all about.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about thermography. Do you find that to be a valid technology for detecting breast cancer? I had a guest on the show a while ago talking about thermography and sonogram and whatnot. And I’ve had a thermography. What do you think about that technology?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, this is going to be a little disappointing, but basically, a thermogram is an infrared picture of your breast. Right now, we’re only talking about thermograms to the breast. Beyond the whole body, thermograms, I don’t know anything about, and they may actually be worth something from a physiologic point of view.
This was started at Dartmouth and the late 70’s. And at the time, the cancers that were being found were about 2 or 3 centimeters in diameter. And so the way the thermogram works is if there’s a hot spot, which is a tumor, that’s metabolized and faster that’s why it’s hot, if it’s big enough, just as you can feel on the breast, you can feel the heat.
If you want a cancer that’s a centimeter and you compare that with 3 centimeters, it’s a third of a third of a third because it’s wider this way, it’s wider that way, and it’s wider that way. So it’s 3 x 3 x 3, it’s about 4% a big cancer. You’re just not going to see it because not that the film doesn’t work that well, but the skin and the tissue over that small cancer work as a blanket. So the heat doesn’t get off.
So you have to have a fairly big cancer that’s close to the surface. And it works minimally.
When I started SonoCine, I went out and did this test to see whether it worked because I thought it was going to work, but I didn’t know. So we had five different places that we’re doing it, put all the data together, looked at it and said, “Yes, this works.”
There has never been one of those with thermography. And it’s been trial by internet. And that’s not really good. You see things on the internet. You can see things 10 years before. You can see a cancer 10 years before.
Well, if you start out, cancers double about every four months. So they double three times a year. In three and a third years, if you have one cell, now you’ve gone actually up a thousand times. When you run the math, it’s about a thousand times. Now, you have a thousand cells.
The next three and a half years, you have a thousand thousand, so you have a million cells. Now, it’s a millimeter in size.
The next year or the next three and a half years, it’s a billion cells. And a billion cells is about a centimeter, a little bit less than a centimeter.
The next one it would be about the size of a small dog, probably. It would be a thousand times bigger than a centimeter.
People say, who are advertising thermography, “We can see it all the way back to one cell.”
No, you can’t. No, you can’t. It’s like, I can shut my eyes and I can go to Pluto. No, you can’t do that. It doesn’t work.
There is real science there, and you have to do things that meet some sets of rules.
Wendy Myers: Yes, exactly.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: It’s that simple.
So as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve personally seen women who have had thermograms that I could see if they had their shirt off from across the room, even though the thermogram is called normal, I can see the cancer. And what that meant is not only was the thermography technology good enough, but the people that were dealing with it, they don’t have to pass a test to go out there and say, “I don’t have to do thermography.” You just take $20,000 and buy a machine and say, “Here I am.”
And there have been some people who get pretty good at it. But they’re limited. The fact that there is a lot of people that have a thermogram machine, it’s chaos.
Wendy Myers: Thank you for that insight. So is there anything else that you wanted to add that listeners may need to know about SonoCine?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, what I would say is push to the insurance companies ultrasound and the best way of doing ultrasound is going to rise at the top, which is […]. You don’t have to push back. It does it better than anything else that’s in ultrasound and there are various reasons for that. But any of your listeners are […] who are close enough want to come see me, I am in Pasadena. You can find me on the internet, Kevin M. Kelly, M.D. And if you find one from San Diego, that’s my son. He’s an ER doc. This is in Pasadena. I’d love to have you.
Particularly, if you think you have something wrong, then just make sure I am there because if you think you’ve got a mass or something like that that nobody’s attended to, let me know and we’ll get to the bottom of it before you go home.
Wendy Myers: How often do you have a SonoCine exam?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: About once a year because things double in once a year. So if you couldn’t find it when it was just less than 5 millimeters (which probably isn’t true, but you’ve got to draw a line somewhere), we want to find it by the time it’s a centimeter, and it looks like 90% of cancers will show up between 5 and 10 millimeters once you’ve past the test once because every year, it will have time enough to get above a centimeter.
Wendy Myers: And you said you find cancers in about 1 in 200 women that come to your clinic, correct?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Initially, yes. In fact, it’s one of the women who is very good is a radiologist in Arizona, whatever the fancy town outside of Phoenix. Scottsdale. And she’s very good. She’s got very good eyes. The first year, she’s got a very small practice, she found five or six cancers. And then the next year she said, “I only found on.”
She said, “I think I’m losing my skill.”
I said, “No. You cleaned out the closet because you’ve got the ones that didn’t show this year on the mammogram, the ones that would not show up on a mammogram in two years and probably half of the ones that won’t show up for three years. And so you’ve got all of the ones to get, and now you have to wait for a new crop to grow.”
Basically, once you get past the first one, you’re probably locating maybe two in a thousand, and before, it depends, five, six, maybe per thousand.
Wendy Myers: What are some of the signs of breast cancer? Say a woman who is concerned about her breast. I know for my breast, my right breast, my implants leaking, and I had some achiness, and my nipple was itching quite a bit. And I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what.
So can you tell us a little bit about what symptoms a woman can expect if she has a breast cancer tumor?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: The first thing is if you feel a mass, a lump, no matter what they tell you, get somebody to put an ultrasound probe on there because you can see if that’s a cancer. You know exactly where it is. You say, “It’s right here.”
Now, there are things that cause lumps that aren’t cancer. First of all, underwire bras, they don’t cause cancer but they’re irritants because they stick up, and the breast, it’s […] If you’re wearing a purse on that side, the purse strap is pushing down every step, and the wire is bouncing off every step. Often times, you’ll get irritation from that.
It doesn’t cause cancer, but it causes tenderness. And women say, “What is this?”
So that’s fairly common. It happens more on the left side because the left breast is usually bigger than the right breast, and about 10%, it’s the other way around. But most of the time, it’s the left breast is larger than the right.
So the bra because the cups are made the same, that alone can cause problems just because the pivot point is the outside point of the larger breast. It will irritate that.
You can have things like short women who are fairly busty. If they’re less than 5’4”, the seatbelt doesn’t fit right. The seatbelt is made for basically 5’4” and above to about 6’0”. Otherwise, it starts giving you trouble. What happens is if you’ll notice on the left breast, on the inside of the breast, the inside part that’s closer to the breastbone, down toward the bottom, is irritated. If you push there, it’s hurting, and it chronically goes on and off, next time you’re in the car, look at where the seatbelt is and push on the edge of the seatbelt that’s close to the breastbone. And if that hurts, go buy one of those fuzzy things they have in the carwash. That’s what those are for. It’s to keep that seatbelt from irritating you.
None of that causes cancer. But when you have something that’s irritating you or feels like a mass, you have to get an answer. And sometimes it’s that simple. Sometimes you have to get an ultrasound and say, “Yes, there’s nothing here. Let’s try and figure out what’s wrong.” Or maybe there is something there.
Wendy Myers: So can a woman have itching or pain or any other kind of vague symptoms like that if she has a tumor?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Itching often times the areolas are more allergenic or they have more allergy problems than the usual skin. So if you have itchy nipples and areola, generally it means look at the soaps, look at what you’re using in your dryer, all these bounces or fluffier, or whatever the hell they are. Those can cause allergies.
Sometimes it’s only one nipple.
So you try to get rid all the other allergens first, and they’re usually topical allergens, perfumes, deodorants, whatever you […] down there is an allergen. And so that is the first level that you try.
If you have something that’s persistent on your nipple, there’s a thing that’s called Paget’s disease which can be a cancer. But that’s rare. Go through these other things first. And generally speaking, the one thing that I have seen, the women who come in say, “I hurt here and sometimes it’s over here, and sometimes there.” They usually turn up to be nothing.
The one that comes in and says, “I can’t feel this but I know there is something right here.” And often times, they’re right. It’s not that it hurts. You’re getting a signal that says, “Something’s wrong here.” And it’s usually a very strong signal. And when that happens, you go find somebody who knows what they’re doing and put an ultrasound right on that and see what it is.
Sometimes it’s not but if it’s enough times, get it checked out.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Kelly, thank you so much for coming in the show. I really, really appreciate it. Why don’t you tell the listeners again where they can find you and learn more about the SonoCine breast exam?
Dr. Kevin Kelly: There’s SonoCine.com which is about the SonoCine. There is my website, which is KKMDInc.com.
Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for coming in the show. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Kevin Kelly: Well, Wendy, thank you for giving me an opportunity to bring what knowledge I have out to women. And any of them that have questions, tell them to give me a buzz.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com. And you can learn all about my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
