One in eight—that’s the chance of an American woman being diagnosed with breast cancer. While “early detection” is often the reason given for the push for mammograms, these tests detect cancer only after it has become a lump or bump—which can take eight to 10 years to develop.

U.S. Food & Drug Administration-approved thermography is a procedure that can detect a change in body temperature as small as one-hundredth of a degree, which can indicate signs of pre-cancerous cell growth up to 10 years prior to being discovered by other procedures.

While thermography does not diagnose breast cancer, it alerts the clinician of abnormalities and identifies the higher chemical and blood vessel activity in both pre-cancerous tissue and areas surrounding a developing tumor. These temperature variations may be identifying the earliest signs of impending breast cancer. In early stages, natural therapies are effective in reversing these tendencies before they’ve progressed to a difficult-to-treat stage.

Dr. Gary Snyder, of the Alternative Medicine Center, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, states, “Aside from the politics of medicine, where tests like thermography are not well-recognized, we do have an alternative to radiation when working toward early detection, and encourage women to examine and utilize this important diagnostic tool as an annual screening alternative.”