There’s good news: New studies indicate that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy may provide drug-free management of the distressing hot flashes and night sweats that often occur after breast cancer treatment and during the menopausal transition.
Whenever big news in breast cancer is reported, those of us who are in the thick of it, the physicians actually taking care of women with breast cancer, brace ourselves for the flurry of phone calls, emails and texts from our patients wanting to know one thing: “How does this new development apply to me?”
Breast surgery is already anxiety-provoking and psychologically traumatic. Why not help decrease the physical pain associated with these procedures?
I was a 27-year-old surgical intern at New York Hospital in 1976 when I took care of my first patient who died from breast cancer. Mrs. M. was a 40-year-old woman with two young children and a loving husband. About eight weeks before I began treating her, she had noticed that her left breast had become swollen, red, and somewhat tender. Her skin felt firm and the texture was like the skin of an orange.
New research out of Wake Forest Medical Center, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, revealed an interesting trend: Women diagnosed with breast cancer were choosing to have not only the affected breast removed, but also the normal, healthy one — even when they did not carry the gene for developing breast cancer