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Lecture Series · Breast Health
Breast health, hormones and environmental load.
Adapted from Dr. Patricia Sheppard's public lecture on breast health — how environmental toxic load affects the immune system, why insulin belongs in a conversation about hormones, and how the liver's ability to clear estrogens shapes the whole picture.
Read this first
This article is educational. It is not about preventing, treating or curing cancer, and nothing here should be read that way. Chiropractic and nutritional care do not replace screening, diagnosis or oncology treatment.
Keep to the screening schedule your physician recommends, and if you notice a change in your breast, see your doctor promptly. What follows is about general health factors — blood sugar, hormone clearance, environmental exposure — that matter to how the whole body works.
Risk factors the research identifies
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women other than skin cancer, and its incidence in the West is substantially higher than in Japan and much of Asia and Africa — a gap wide enough that researchers have long treated environment and diet as part of the explanation rather than genetics alone.
The risk factors Dr. Sheppard presented are the ones the mainstream literature identifies:
- Family history of breast cancer
- Early onset of menstruation
- Low fruit and vegetable intake
- Lack of exercise
- Weight gain, particularly as an adult before menopause
- Estrogen-containing oral contraceptive use
- Smoking
- Radiation exposure
- A previous benign breast biopsy
Her slides listed environmental toxins separately and labelled them honestly — theorised but not proven. That caveat is hers, and it still stands.
Environmental Load
What the body is asked to clear
Heavy metals
Mercury — notably in tuna and sea bass — along with lead, aluminium and cadmium. More on detoxification.
Microorganisms
Parasites and bacteria, picked up from restaurants, water supplies, undercooked meat, poorly washed vegetables and raw fish. Dr. Sheppard screens for these routinely.
Insulin: the part most people skip
The pancreas produces insulin to move glucose out of the bloodstream and into cells for energy. Persistently high blood sugar leads to insulin resistance — cells stop responding to the message, so the pancreas secretes more and more.
Two consequences follow. The first is familiar: excess blood sugar is stored as fat, which is why weight climbs even on a low-calorie diet. The second is the one the lecture is built around — insulin does not act alone. It interacts with insulin-like growth factor, human growth hormone, cortisol, serotonin and noradrenaline, and that whole group influences how genes are expressed.
Every cell carries the same genetic information; only part of it is ever expressed, and the rest lies dormant. Hormonal balance is one of the things that shapes which part. That is why blood sugar, of all things, ends up in a talk about breast health.
Clearance, and the nervous system
Estrogens are metabolised and cleared by the liver. When that clearance is sluggish, tissue stays exposed to hormonal signalling longer than it should — the subject of the hormone lecture in more depth.
Dr. Sheppard adds one more layer. Sensory nerve fibres carry messages to and from the spinal cord and brain, and insults to the body — chemicals, heavy metals, microorganisms — can dull them. Dulled fibres do not function at capacity; they drift toward hyper- or hypo-sensitivity, and physiological regulation drifts with them. Restoring that signalling is what the structural and neurological side of the practice is for.
The levers she presented are unglamorous and entirely within reach: balance blood sugar, support the liver and lymphatics, manage stress, eat well, exercise, and keep the nervous system working properly.
Questions
Breast health, answered
Does this prevent breast cancer?
No, and we want to be direct about that. Nothing on this page prevents, treats or cures cancer, and no chiropractic or nutritional care should ever be presented that way. This lecture is about general health factors — blood sugar, hormone clearance, environmental exposure — that matter to how the whole body functions.
Should I still get screened?
Yes. Mammography and the screening schedule your physician recommends are not optional and are not replaced by anything described here. If you notice a change in your breast, see your doctor promptly — do not wait on a nutritional programme.
What is insulin resistance, in plain terms?
Your cells stop responding properly to insulin's message to take glucose out of the bloodstream, so the pancreas has to secrete more and more of it. Persistently high insulin influences many other hormones, and it causes weight gain even on a low-calorie diet, because the excess blood sugar gets stored as fat.
Why does the liver keep coming up?
Because estrogens are broken down and cleared there, through Phase I and Phase II pathways. When clearance is sluggish, tissue stays exposed to hormonal signalling longer than it otherwise would. The hormone lecture covers this in more detail.
What would Dr. Sheppard actually do?
Look at the whole picture: blood sugar and insulin, hormone metabolism and liver clearance, nutritional status, environmental exposure history, and the structural and neurological exam. Then a written plan. See what we test.
The original lecture slides
This article is adapted from Dr. Sheppard's presentation. The slide deck she delivered it from is still available to download.
This article is adapted from a public lecture given by Dr. Sheppard and is offered for education only. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for care from your physician. Nothing here is a claim to prevent, treat or cure any disease.
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