My Doctor Doesn’t Know Much About Thermography

My doctor does not know much about thermography and isn’t sure it is a valid diagnostic tool. How should I respond to this?

Key Facts:

1. The camera is FDA cleared.
2. The American Medical Association (AMA) approved thermography as an adjunctive test for the diagnosis of breast disease in 1982.
3. In 1984 the AMA certified that thermography was “beyond the experimental and investigational stages.”
4. Over the last ten years, there have been great technological advances in thermal imaging cameras and their accompanying computer software.
5. Medical thermography has been available for over 60 years, predating mammography by a decade.

There is confusion surrounding thermography due in part to the fact that, in 1983, thermography was inappropriately placed in a DATTA study. The Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technology Assessment program (DATTA) was established by the AMA to provide accurate, balanced, and up-to-date information on medical technology to the practicing medical community. Once the study on thermography was completed, it was apparent that it had serious flaws. Many of the testing sites were mobile trailers without any temperature or environmental controls. In a diagnostic test that depends primarily on temperature measurement, this was an inexcusable omission. Next, the “technicians” who performed the studies had little or no training. Finally, the interpreters were radiologists who had no expertise in the interpretation of thermal images, many of whom were operating under the misguided premise that the evaluation of a thermogram was “simple.” Moreover, it was not until the 1980s that the thermographic community established standard protocols and formal training.

How then, could the study with all of its inherent flaws have stood a chance of accurately evaluating thermography? And yet to this day, critics of thermography still rely on this forty-year-old study while choosing to ignore the monumental advances in thermal imaging.

The use of thermography in the diagnosis of neuropathic pain is clearly explained by reading Dr. Getson’s article titled “The Use of Thermography in the Diagnosis of CRPS: A Physician’s Opinion”. Click here to read this article.