VIDEO: Role of breast cancer awareness in patient care

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Breast cancer awareness is such a broad term. The most important thing it means is that we all should be aware of our health. We should recognize things most importantly that are preventable that can attenuate any problem with your health that maybe be developing early. And this of course starts with screening for appropriate illnesses whether they're cancer or non-cancer. In the case of breast cancer, obviously, screening now starting at the age of 45 for your average patient, maybe even earlier for those with predisposition, does save lives. And it comes at the cost of diagnoses of cancers that may never have affected the patient that may be some degree of over treatment. It's really hard to discern that and pull that out. But, in general, that's an important part of awareness.

And then of course, it's good for patients to understand about breast cancer and what the standard treatments are. I really think of the patient-physician relationship as a true partnership where both of us are trying to learn and learn from each other. And importantly, able to counsel the patient to how to weigh different choices and make right choices. So, awareness is also awareness about your own situation, awareness of the field, awareness of research, awareness of how important things like sharing their symptoms with the doctor may be, and then awareness of research knowing when patients may be eligible for trials on the patient's end, on the physician's end, and on the patient's and understanding what research is about and what safeguards are in place, what the unknowns are, what the issues would be for a specific trial for which they may be considered. These are all such important things. And then we have sort of the broader population that needs to know about healthcare in general, and also people that are administrators and legislators and governmental agencies that can also be partners in our ability to responsibly use our resources to develop the next generation of therapies and to use them properly and to learn from them so that when we are doing both standard of care therapy, as well as clinical trials, that information is going to a place where it can safely protecting the confidentiality of patients be used to understand more the whole field of artificial intelligence to take clinical data and use computer algorithms to learn more, to look at images in pathology, radiology, and just data mining patient records can generate so much new knowledge. So people have to be aware of this and participate in these many, many diverse areas that are going to move us forward.