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“Due to the quality of life that Westchester offers, many of the finest physicians, trained at the most prestigious institutions, go and practice here,” Cahan says.
“I’m a Columbia surgeon and yet I feel very comfortable doing all my surgery at Lawrence Hospital,” says Pass, who lives in Bronxville and has two children in the Bronxville school district.
“Some people need to be in the big bricks-and-mortar places, and that’s fine,” she adds.
And it may be particularly good medical advice for rare breast cancers, Newell says. “Some of the seldom seen cancers, especially some of the sarcomas and the ways they are treated, would benefit from a visit to Memorial,” she says.
Another option for those newly diagnosed in the suburbs is to have the surgery in a huge-name medical center in the city, with all follow-up care and treatment at a facility closer to home.
“Surgery is a one-time deal, whereas chemotherapy can be pretty intensive in terms of the number of treatments and complications you might have,” Mills says.
If post-surgery radiation is advised, that can mean daily therapy for five or six weeks, she adds. “That’s a lot of visits if you’re talking about schlepping into Manhattan — that’s a lot of time and inconvenience. If you can do it in your own back yard, that makes it so much simpler for patients.”
Myth: I know women with breast cancer whose mammogram didn’t detect the disease. So why bother with getting one every year?
“Unfortunately, no imaging test available is 100 percent accurate in detecting breast cancer,” says Dr. Patricia Joseph, director of Breast and Women’s Health Prevention Services at Nyack Hospital. “Mammography, ultrasound and breast MRI can all miss breast cancers, but that does not mean that none of the tests are useful. Mammography is still the best in being able to detect cancer at an early stage when it is most curable.”
“It saves lives,” adds Dr. Abraham Mittelman, a medical oncologist with Northern Westchester Hospital, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center and NY Medical College. “If you look at the American Cancer Society statistics over the past 10 years, there’s been an improvement, or decrease in death rates from breast cancer, because we find it earlier.”
Article source: http://www.lohud.com/article/20111009/LIFESTYLE01/110090313/Dispelling-myths-about-breast-cancer
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