The Aesthetics Advisor

In this interview, Susan Wadia-Ells, Ph.D., discusses breast cancer as an unnecessary U.S. epidemic and how to help prevent it, which is the topic of her book, " Busting Breast Cancer: Five Simple Steps to Keep Breast Cancer Out of Your Body ." This year alone, an expected 300,000 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. Another 50,000 are projected to be diagnosed with non-invasive breast cancer, which in all likelihood isn't cancer at all. Wadia-Ells has a graduate degree in energy economics and political development (MALD) and a Ph.D. in women's studies with a focus on women's autobiographical writing. "This really means that I am an investigative reporter," she says, "and so I've come to this with a very innocent, independent mind." The inspiration behind the book was Wadia-Ells' experience of losing several friends to recurrent metastatic breast cancer, meaning canc...

Have you ever wished that someone’s cancer would magically disappear? For dozens, maybe hundreds of patients each year, this is exactly what happens. It’s called spontaneous regression, and it has medical science baffled While it may sound like a fairytale or, at best, a one-in-a-million anomaly, cases of spontaneous healing from cancer have been documented in the scientific literature for hundreds of years—with surprising frequency. In 2002, more than four articles were published on the subject in medical journals in an average month. [i] From the case of “St. Peregrine’s tumor” that disappeared in the 13th century [ii]  to a recorded remission case in Paris in 1742, [iii]  the phenomenon of spontaneous regression of cancer has long baffled doctors and, undoubtedly, delighted patients who, in many cases, went on to lead healthy lives without a recurrence of cancer. While cases of spontaneous and complete healing from cancer are not always the norm, they have been ac...

Each year, approximately 264,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in women in the United States, accounting for 30% of all new cancer cases among women. Over the past thirty years, modest strides have been made in reducing breast cancer mortality , largely due to increased and improved screening and more effective treatments. Prognosis is dependent on both how advanced the disease is at the time of diagnosis and the characteristics of the tumor. Breast cancer is categorized by the presence or absence of several types of receptors on the cell membrane: estrogen, progesterone, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). When caught early, the best survival rates occur with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative tumors. Survival rates are lower with tumors enriched with HER2 receptors due to the resistance to anti-HER2 treatments that occurs either de novo or over the course of treatment.  The worst prognoses occur in tumors that do not express any of these three t...