Archive for the ‘Symptoms & Diagnosis’ Category

(Un) Common Knowledge Transcript

Below is an edited version of the webinar I presented through the Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Foundation October 16, 2012. You can still get the actual webinar on the Foundation’s site. It was based on questions sent in from women with TNBC.  

I was diagnosed with hormone negative breast cancer in 2006, and I’ve been studying this disease since then, reading research papers, interviewing experts and …

SABCS: A Recap of Triple-Negative Research

The best news from the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is its emphasis on triple-negative breast cancer. There are so many papers presented on the subject that I can’t keep up. Those of us who have been hanging around this dance for a long time—I was diagnosed in 2006—remember the frustration of seeing and hearing little about this disease from researchers and nothing from …

What My Patients Are Asking: Can Getting a Biopsy Spread the Cancer?

First of all, there is no way of getting around a biopsy. There are side effects with any procedure but in order to properly treat a patient, a good biopsy specimen is absolutely critical. The benefit of being able to select the proper surgery and subsequent treatment clearly outweighs the risk.

That said, many women come to me concerned that their biopsy might have spread …