Maintaining Breast Health Begins With Awareness: A How-To Guide

Tits, boobs, hooters, the girls, fun bags, flesh bags, high beams, jugs, racks, melons, knockers, and torpedoes. Did we miss anything? Breasts, and their many nicknames, get an awful lot of attention, and though they may be key to your female anatomy, most likely you think of them as just another part of your body, lovely though they may be. Quite possibly you see them as essential to your future since your, um, mammary glands — just kills the mood, right guys? — may someday feed your children. As the owner of a pair of glands, then, you understand you've been tasked with the important responsibility of maintaining their well-being, an often humdrum job at best. To help you fulfill your duty, we've outlined the accepted wisdom concerning breast health.

Self-Awareness = Self-Exams
      Healthy breasts begin and end with developing a sense of what the everyday reality is for your girls. The point? When you know what’s normal, you will be able to recognize what’s not normal. And when something's not normal, you can promptly call a doctor. For this reason, the very first and most important suggestion is you should consider doing regular self-exams.
     Now, there are all sorts of diagrams and demonstrations showing you a how-to self-examination — go to the American Cancer Society for the most up-to-date method — but the truth of the matter is a simple daily feeling of your own two breasts will help plenty. (Remember: Many lumps and tumors are first discovered by, not the woman herself, but by her sex partner.) If you make it a habit to touch and examine your breasts each morning while you’re getting dressed, say, or before you go to bed at night, you’ll soon enough learn how your breasts and nipples feel normally. You'll experience the increasing sensitivity as you get closer to your period, while you discover their natural bumps and lumps (many, many women have unsmooth breasts).

Citizens Advice - Complaining about the NHS

You may have several options to make a complaint about health services. One option is to use the complaints procedure, or you may be able to report your concerns to a different organisation, for example, an Ombudsman or the regulatory body of the professional involved. In serious cases, you might want advice about taking legal action.

Complaining About The NHS

• Where to start
• Deciding whether to complain
• Deciding what outcomes you want to achieve
• NHS complaints procedure
• Who you can go to when you have a problem

Taking your complaint to court

In most cases, making a complaint using the NHS complaints procedure will solve a problem. But in some cases, you might need to take legal action

Learn more

Your Rights Under The NHS Constitution                                                                   

Summary of the legal rights and pledges set out in the NHS Constitution, and what to do if the standard of health or adult care you recieve doesn't meet the promised standards

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NHS patients' rights

Complaints about GPs

Access to medical reports and health records

6 Signs It’s Time to Ditch Your Doctor

As patients with chronic illness, we’re well-accustomed to going to the doctor. Many of us have had great medical teams, but I know we’ve all had the experience of seeing a medical professional and leaving upset. Obviously, communication is a two-way street and we need to do our part as patients, as well as have reasonable expectations for our providers. Sometimes though, it becomes necessary to fire a doctor and move on.
Here are some hints it might be time to change doctors:
1)  Your doctor is unapologetic about a mistake. Doctors are humans and therefore mistakes are going to happen. If your doctor seems distressed about the error and changes how they operate to guard against another mistake, great! But if your doctor can’t understand why you’re upset, downplays the error or your feelings, and doesn’t make any relevant changes, it may be time to give them the pink slip

What Not to Do After Breast Surgery Video

One of the most dreaded complications after breast augmentation surgery is bleeding or hematoma. A Hematoma is a collection of blood within the pocket of the breast where the implant is placed. So the reason this is a feared complication is that when there is bleeding first of all another operation is required to evacuate the blood. However, more importantly we know that when bleeding occurs, the risk of capsular contracture around the implant increases. Capsular contracture is scar tissue that forms naturally around the breast if that capsule becomes thickens, it can actually contract or deform the shape of the breast or the implant and it can cause pain. 

So the risk of contraction of this capsule increases when there is bleeding after breast surgery. Because of this, I tell my patients to do everything they can to minimize any stress after breast surgery. I have people with them after surgery particularly in the first few nights after surgery. I ask them to have somebody help them out of bed. I don't want them to strain in any way. If the patient feels nauseous, I give them anti-nausea medication so that they don't vomit, because vomiting actually increases the blood pressure which can increase the chances of bleeding.

So all precautions are taken to minimize the chance of post operative bleeding and essentially those precautions include just keeping the patient calm. They can walk around and in fact I prefer they don't stay in bed; however, I don't want them to stress in any way shape or form. In addition to that, while the breast implant pocket is healing, I put restrictions on the amount of arm movements the patients can make. I don't allow them to bring their arms up past their shoulder height. They can however move their arm in this direction, however, the upper arm should not move past shoulder height. This again is to prevent any problems with the implant pocket while it's healing. Certainly patients cannot exercise for the first few weeks but in four to six weeks when things have completely healed, they can resume their normal activities.