How often should I do a breast self-examination?
Breast self-exams are a controversial topic, and recently the American Cancer Society has recommended not to recommend general breast self-examination, but to recommend a general breast health awareness, so that a woman is aware if there are changes in her breast. The difficult thing is that there have been a number of studies looking at the efficacy of breast self-exam, to pick up breast cancer earlier and to try to improve breast cancer outcomes, and what they found was that breast self-examination actually did not lead to picking up breast cancers earlier and led to more biopsies for benign conditions. And so overall it did not help breast cancer outcomes. Having said that, those are studies done on large groups of individuals and for populations. For any one individual, I can tell you plenty of stories of women who noticed an abnormality in their breast because they were doing a breast self-examination which led to the cancer. So I personally have a hard time saying not to recommend it, but it's a woman's individual choice to decide whether she wants to examine her breasts or not, looking for lumps. If she does not decide to look for lumps, it's important that she is still aware of what her normal breast looks like so that if there are any changes, she picks up on them sooner rather than later.
