TV personality Gail Porter, it must be said, has been through more than her fair share of setbacks.
At the height of her fame she famously lost all her hair, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and briefly sectioned only a few years later. In 2009 she lost her mum to cancer.
One night last summer, while changing into her pyjamas, she wondered if her luck had failed her again. Checking her breasts, as she did regularly, she felt clearly discernable lumps.
'I could feel small hard lumps all over both breasts and I thought: ''Those weren't there before,'' ' says Gail, 48, who has a teenage daughter, Honey, with her former husband, Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave.
Gail Porter, checking her breasts, as she did regularly, felt clearly discernable lumps last summer
Having lost relatives to cancer — her maternal great-grandmother had breast cancer, her grandmother thyroid cancer and her mother Sandra died of lung cancer in 2009 — Gail understandably thought the worst.
'But you have to face your fears,' she says. 'It's really easy to think: 'I'll go to Sainsbury's and not think about this.' Instead, I started to look into what I could do.'
The obvious next step would have been to ask her GP for referral for a mammogram. This form of X-ray is offered by the NHS to all women over the age of 50 every three years. But Gail, then aged 47, had not yet had one.
And she had reservations: she wanted answers quickly and she had concerns about the radiation exposure that comes with a mammogram.
In fact, according to Public Health England figures, the risk of radiation-induced cancer is only between one in 49,000 and one in 98,000 per mammogram; each visit exposes a woman to roughly the same radiation she'd receive from the natural environment over a matter of weeks.
But Gail still felt it was a risk she wanted to avoid if possible. And, through the power of Google, she came across an alternative: thermography.
This controversial technique uses an infrared camera to pick up temperature changes in the breast: the 'thermogram' image looks like a heat map.
The theory is that tumours, which are formed of rapidly dividing cells, demand a high blood flow and show up as a 'hot spot'.
She was wary of an NHS mammogram and, through the power of Google, she came across an alternative: thermography
More contentiously, it's claimed it can detect heat changes up to ten years before cancer can be spotted by a mammogram.
'If you have heat from one breast that's not coming from another, that flags up that there could be a problem,' says Dr Nyjon Eccles, a doctor with a special interest in integrated medicine, who performed Gail's thermogram.
'It could be that there is inflammation or infection — but it could also be an early cancer.'
Images are taken in a cool room and Dr Eccles says the cameras used can detect temperature differences of 0.05c. 'The heat variations between the two breasts are compared by computer-assisted technology — far more accurate than the human eye,' argues Dr Eccles.
He would like to see it as an 'adjunct at least' to mammograms, to detect cancer sooner.
Proponents say thermography is pain-free (whereas with a mammogram the breast is squeezed between two X-ray sheets) and, as there is no radiation, they can be repeated as regularly as needed.
This controversial technique uses an infrared camera to pick up temperature changes in the breasts
It might sound an
