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Correct, deep, belly breathing, says Dr. Hendricks, has been shown to:

•     Melt tension. It counters the shallow tight breaths produced by the instinctive fight-or-flight response that we find ourselves kicked into frequently.

•     Clarify and focus the mind.

•     Increase energy and endurance.

•     Clear unpleasant emotions. Two or three big breaths at the onset of an injurious emotion such as fear, anxiety, or depression are often enough to move it out of the body.

•     Help manage pain. (This is why it is taught in natural childbirth classes.) Do not hold your breath when in pain or anticipating pain. Instead, breathe – calmly, deeply.

•     Improve athletic performance.

•     Significantly lower blood pressure.

Deep breathing and breathing in general help in treating many modern-day maladies. “Breathing exercises are a major emphasis of the yoga classes I teach in Hawaii,” says Arthur Brownstein, M.D., medical director of the Princeville Medical Clinic and clinical instructor of medicine at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu. Breathing exercises are also a major component of the stress-management program taught to heart patients during the highly touted programs conducted by the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California.

Breathing exercises

The following are the basics of Breathing 101, as taught by Dr. Hendricks as well as Barbara Lang, who teaches Yogic breathing in an intensive medically supervised program for people with heart problems and other degenerative diseases.

Get past tense. Tense your abdomen. Relax your abdomen. Tense your abdomen. Relax your abdomen. Do this maybe a dozen times, until you are well aware of how a relaxed abdomen feels.

Give yourself a hand. Put your hand on your abdomen. Breathe slowly, comfortably, deeply enough to make your hand rise with each inhalation and fall with each exhalation.

Go for ribs. Keep breathing slowly, comfortably and into your belly. If you are truly breathing correctly, you will feel your rib cage expand to the side with each inhalation.

Move your spine. “Babies can lie in a crib all day without getting a backache because they move their spines with each breath,” says Dr. Hendricks. “We tend to hold ourselves more stiffly as we age.” With each in-breath, let your spine move away from the chair back (if you’re sitting) or away from the floor (if you’re lying on your back). On each out-breath, let it flatten against the chair or floor.

That’s your basic, healthy breathing. To remember to do it, associate the term breathe with normal everyday activities such as standing, sitting, or turning, says Larry J.

Feldman, Ph.D., director of the Pain and Stress Rehabilitation Center in New Castle, Delaware. Then, he says, taking healthy, deep breaths at intervals throughout your day will be as natural as, well, breathing.

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Most breast cancers arise from the epithelia in the breast, and these are known as carcinomas. In-situ carcinoma is the term used for a carcinoma which remains in the position in which it developed, with no sign of invasion into the surrounding tissues. Sarcomas – tumours arising from the connective tissue -are rare in the breast.

Some 90 per cent of breast cancers develop within the epithelial lining of the ducts. Of the remainder, about 5 per cent occur within the lobules of the breast, and these are likely to be associated with second tumours in the same or the other breast. The remaining 5 per cent are a combination of ductal and lobular cancers. There are variant forms of most types of breast cancer, sometimes with a different prognosis from that of the tumours they resemble.

Different names are used to identify the same cancers in different countries, and by different doctors within a country. Confusion is therefore rife – not least amongst the medical profession itself.

Ductal tumours

Scirrhous/non-specific ductal carcinoma

This is the most common form of ductal breast cancer, which usually develops as a hard, painless swelling in women near their menopause. It often occurs in the upper outer quadrant of the breast and may spread into the surrounding fat. Malignant cells may also be present in nearby lymph vessels and blood capillaries. A scirrhous carcinoma that has invaded the lymph nodes or the lymph vessels near the skin is likely to have a worse prognosis.

Atrophic scirrhous carcinoma

This is a very slow-growing tumour which may cause contraction and deformity of the breast in elderly women. It is often only found during routine medical examination and can remain localized in the breast for many years.

Medullary carcinoma

Also called lymphocytic or encephaloid carcinoma, this is a softer, more rapidly growing tumour than the scirrhous. It is said to have a better prognosis, even when spread has occurred to the lymph nodes in the armpits. If the body launches a strong defensive response itself, the prognosis can be even better. There is less fibrous reaction (unlike with the scirrhous type), and many disease-fighting lymphocytes are seen within the cancer.

There is also a variant of this type of cancer which is known as atypical medullary carcinoma. This is an intermediate form combining characteristics of a medullary and a scirrhous carcinoma.

Inflammatory carcinoma/carcinoma of pregnancy and lactation

These tumours may resemble a breast abscess. They grow rapidly and may cause the breast to become hot and tender. They do not normally become apparent until it is too late for them to be treated successfully.

Papillary carcinoma

Papillary carcinomas are a rare variant of the non-specific ductal form, with a good prognosis. They develop as a mass of cells within the lumen of a duct, and they present early with bloody nipple discharge.

Cystic carcinoma

Cystic carcinomas are rare (only about 1 per cent of all breast cancers), but they have a poor prognosis. When aspirated, the fluid they contain is bloody, and malignant cells can be seen within it when it is examined under a microscope.

Lobular tumours

Cancers in the lobules of the breast are 10 to 20 times less common than ductal tumours. The prognoses are similar, but lobular tumours are more likely to occur in both breasts, Sometimes several being present at the same time.

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Screening procedures that are definitely not worth doing routinely are barium enemas; barium meals; looking for cells in the sputum (spit); stress testing; lung-function tests; and biopsies of the lining of the uterus. All of these are, of course, useful diagnostic procedures in specific individuals.

Screening can be carried out in the community in general or it can be focused on specific sub-groups who are thought to be ‘at risk’. As we have seen, when screening for cervical cancer, money is best spent on screening women from lower down the socio-economic scale because it is much more common in this group.

Families are population sub-groups ripe for screening. The predisposition for many diseases (as well as truly hereditary disease, of course) runs in families. Common examples are breast cancer, diabetes, asthma and high blood pressure. Doctors have always considered screening families in the context of infectious diseases in the past but few do this kind î intra-family screening for chronic conditions.

Screening, especially the sort that involves paying a fixed sum for a batch of tests and examinations, is currently enjoying something of a revival. One of the attractions of screening programmes is that the; can often be inexpensive and can be implemented by relatively low grade personnel rather than doctors. But as the price has come down, fewer questions tend to be asked and screening is now-with the coming interactive computer systems-set become even more popular, after decade of apathy and serious questioning of its worth. Another reason for an increased interest in screening recently is that, with the setting-up of new health maintenance and prevention-orientated medical organizations, screening equipment and personnel can be used with the curative staff on hand. A major criticism of screening centers in the past has been that they left the patient high and dry with his or her findings from the screening. These new ways numbers of false positives that occur of working enable responsible follow- with certain screening procedures, up to be a part of the whole picture. This is essential in the light of the Much more research needs to be done before we can be absolutely sure just how valuable many screening procedures are. What looks like commonsense preventive medicine is often not so on deeper analysis. The danger with the coming of cheaper and easier screening methods is that society might ask fewer questions, not more.

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When Dave Venne moved in with some of his buddies, he was looking forward to the companionship and fun. What he didn’t expect was a 15-pound weight gain.

“Those guys ate all the time, and I was right there with them,” says the 25-year-old landscaping-design supervisor from Tempe, Arizona. “Still, I couldn’t believe how quickly the pounds piled up. I went from 225 to 240 in 12 weeks. More than a pound a week!”

At 6-foot-4, Dave carried the extra weight well. But it made him feel heavy and uncomfortable. “I work outside in the heat, and I felt miserable,” he says. “Plus, I wasn’t running as fast or jumping as high when I played basketball, one of my favorite pastimes.

“My roommates and I would play basketball or do something else for a couple of hours practically every night,” he continues. “By the time we finished, we’d be so hungry that we’d eat just about anything that we could get our hands on.” Their foods of choice were pizza, burgers, and Mexican takeout, all washed down with copious quantities of soda and beer. “Sometimes, I’d eat an entire pizza and drink three or four beers, plus a couple of Cokes, before going to bed,” Dave says. “And that was on top of eating a sandwich or something else when I got home from work.”

Feeling out of shape and overweight, Dave decided his late-night eating habits had to go. “I figured that if I ate a good dinner, I wouldn’t get hungry later that night,” he says. “I’m not much of a cook, but even I can heat up a can of soup and put together a turkey sandwich.”

As he began paying more attention to his food choices, his other meals became healthier, too. He traded in his usual sausage-egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich for a bowl of cereal, a glass of orange juice, and sometimes toast. For lunch, he still favored fast-food restaurants, but he replaced his bacon double cheeseburgers with grilled chicken sandwiches. And he carried bottles of water with him everywhere. “I have to drink a lot while I’m working,” he explains. “I used to down seven or eight sodas a day. I think that switching to water helped me lose weight.”

Indeed, Dave got rid of those 15 extra pounds, plus 8 more, in about 6 months. He has held steady at 217 pounds, a comfortable weight for his size, since 1998.

These days, Dave seldom eats after 8 o’clock at night. If he feels hungry after a couple of hours of shooting hoops, he’ll eat fruit or fat-free frozen yogurt. When his roommates order out, he helps himself to a healthy snack or goes to bed instead.

“Being around junk food and not eating any of it was hard at first,” Dave admits. “But now I feel so much better about myself that I don’t even miss that stuff.”

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