Excerpt from an American Medical Association cancer news article (7/16/07):

"Teaching breast self-exams. A small study at a North Carolina cancer clinic found that most women with breast cancer had found their own tumors through self examination -- and that was true even for women who had regular mammograms.

This finding led researchers at the Leo Jenkins Cancer Center, a clinic at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., to recommend that patients be taught in their physicians' offices how to properly perform breast self-exams and that this detection method be used along with mammograms.

Lead investigator Andrea Rosenberg, MD, a second-year resident in internal medicine at the medical school, presented the findings."