Nov 19, 2019 03:17PM beesie.is.out-of-office wrote:
Yup, lumpectomy and partial mastectomy are the same. It's just a quirky thing as to which term different facilities use and why they use one versus the other. For example, some facilities will use lumpectomy if the breast tissue being removed is all in one quadrant of the breast but will call the operation a partial mastectomy if the breast tissue being removed is in two quadrants of the breast. In my mother's case, because she'd had a lumpectomy as her first surgery, when she went back for a second surgery to get wider surgical margins, her doctor called this second surgery a partial mastectomy, even though very little breast tissue was being removed. Apparently some insurance companies balk at paying for the same type of surgery twice, so this was her doctor's way of avoiding that problem. It was a small easy surgery but my mother was very concerned because the paperwork she signed said "partial mastectomy".
To complicate things further, an excisional biopsy, i.e. a surgical biopsy, is also the same surgery as a lumpectomy, although there may be less concern about surgical margins when the surgery is a biopsy versus when it is being done to remove a known cancer. Some doctors and facilities choose to call the surgery a 'lumpectomy' regardless of whether it's a biopsy or cancer surgery, and that can be really confusing because the term "lumpectomy" is associated with cancer.
A mastectomy, on the other hand, is very different from a lumpectomy/partial mastectomy because it involves the removal of the entire breast.