http://www.care2.com/greenliving/4-common-myths-about-breast-cancer.html
4 Common Myths About Breast Cancer
By Ben Sherwood, Intent.com
On May 7th, Hannah Powell-Auslam of La Mirada, Calif. had a mastectomy to remove her left breast, the kind of surgery that takes place around 137 times per day in the US. Some 185,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and around 50,000 will have mastectomies. But Hannah’s story is different.
She’s only 10 years old.
According to her family’s Website - Hannah is a “typical 10 year old girl. She loves to play sports, ride her bike, watch Hannah Montana and just be a kid.”
In March, the fifth-grader at Escalona Elementary School complained about an itchy breast. After her mom noticed a lump, doctors biopsied the tissue, never imagining it would be cancer. The risk for children and adolescent girls is estimated at around 0.1 percent.
“They told me it was not breast cancer, because breast cancer does not happen to children,” Hannah’s mother said in an interview with The San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
But the doctors were wrong. Lab results in April showed that Hannah’s lump was invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), a type that accounts for around 70 percent of breast cancers. Later, doctors determined it was invasive secretory ductal carcinoma, a subtype with a more favorable prognosis.
“I didn’t really know what cancer was,” Hannah told the San Gabriel newspaper. “I just kept crying and couldn’t stop.”
Today, Hannah is recovering from her mastectomy. “She is doing wonderful,” her parents wrote on their Website. “She is in great spirit[s] and barely complaining at all.” Naturally, some days are very tough: Seeing her incision for the first time was upsetting. Hannah also faces more treatments, including chemo and the possibility of additional surgery and radiation because doctors found cancer cells in the sentinel lymph node under her arm. Over all, the prognosis is excellent: The five-year survival rate for younger patients with secretory ductal carcinoma is 100 percent.
“God chose me because he knows I’m a strong girl and I can get through it,” Hannah says.
Hannah’s story reminds us that the doors of The Survivors Club swing open and shut every hour of the day without regard to age, gender, race or geography. Everyone joins, sooner or later. Whether you’re 10 or 90, there’s no escaping adversity.
With each new membership in the Survivors Club, there are lessons to be learned. While Hannah’s case is extremely rare, it reminds us of some of the myths of breast cancer.
Next: 4 Common Myths about Breast Cancer
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6 comments
add your comment »About 80 percent of women with breast cancer have no known family history of the disease.
That said, it is true that there are families in which many women have dangerous breast cancer and those families do have genes that cause it.
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Thanks for this, but I am a bit concerned that you reveal how younger girls are now getting breast cancer without going into detail as to why - apart from comments from other readers regarding toxins etc, many experts also believe that earlier puberty connected with the increased consumption of meat and dairy is an important contributing factor
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Check out Michael Anderson and his cancer research, it's very impressive and concerning to realize what we leave in the hands of insurance companies who make money off of us being and remaining sick, and makes you feel hopeful that maybe there is something we can do; that's easy too.
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Breastfeeding your babies is one of the best ways to reduce the risk of breast cancer, and yet as a society we make it so hard for young mothers to stay home with their babies long enough to fully breastfeed when they are very small, and then to organize their work schedules around the need to maintain lactation in the second half of the baby's first year. The Scandinavian countries do much better than the USA in this regard.
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Annie is wise to point out both the risks of radiation and chemo and the likelihood of environmental triggers for this child's cancer.
No treatment - allopathic or complementary - can be guaranteed for best results, but the latter are at least less likely to exacerbate the problem with "side" effects.
As for "prevention" - testing, such as mammograms, etc., isn't it - that is just diagnosis, doing nothing to avoid getting cancer.
True prevention is reducing exposure to the many carcinogens in our daily lives, including dietary and those in everyday products. This is true whether or not one has undergone the radical treatments of mainstream medicine or the gentler kind offered by alternative practitioners.
For more info, go to the excellent website of Breast Cancer Action, a rare organization independent from the money-making cancer establishment: www.bcaction.org
Also see tips on environmental toxins and their avoidance at the site of my organization, Toxics Information Project (TIP):
www.toxicsinfo.org/healthconnections/umassstudy.htm
www.toxicsinfo.org/environment/CancerChemicalsAndHistory.htm
www.toxicsinfo.org/TIPS_personal.htm
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This child is fairly unique because she is so young. I urge her family to allow a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat her. One reason is that radiation to a young girl's chest is KNOWN to vastly increase risk of breast cancer. A second is that there are herbs to protect her entire body from the unwanted effects of both chemo and radiation. (sometimes called 'side' effects). Complementary medicine is well established - and some thing in her body/environment/DNA caused this unusual occurrence. I am a 17 year survivor and run www.annieappleseedproject.org with lots of ideas on complementary and alternative care.
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