'tips' posts

Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’ve been paying more attention to online blogs about breast cancer and realize there is a lot of information and misinformation out there. How can you know what’s correct, what’s marketing, and what is just plain wrong? Here are some tips:

1. Be an aware and questioning reader: Ask yourself some of the following questions. What is the source of the information? Does the author have anything to gain financially from the information? Are there studies that provide data supporting the recommendations? Who funded the studies and were there any potential conflicts of interest?

2. Investigate more than one source: Healthcare has become very politicized and complicated but you can find reliable sources. But realize even with trusted sources the information provided may be conflicting. Some reliable sources include: Swedish Cancer Institute, Breast Cancer Action, National Cancer Institute, and American Cancer Society.

3. Don’t be taken in by conspiracy theorists: I have practiced surgery for 30 years in a variety of situations and healthcare institutions and NEVER have I experienced a desire to withhold effective tests and treatments from patients. Physicians and hospital systems are not suppressing tests, treatments, and /or cures in order to stay in business. I don’t know a breast surgeon who wouldn’t be thrilled to have to practice another specialty if there was a way to prevent breast cancer.

Here are some things that I think it is important to know about breast cancer:

Influenza (“flu”) season is unpredictable but usually starts in October each year and peaks around January or February. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently recommends annual flu vaccination for all people older than 6 months. Getting vaccinated is particularly important if you or someone with whom you live has a chronic medical condition, like asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Here are some things I want you to know about influenza and vaccination:

First, influenza is a serious medical illness that can lead to hospitalization and even death. Annually, up to 200,000 people are hospitalized for influenza. Sadly, the H1N1 outbreak in the 2009 – 2010 flu season caused about 12,000 deaths.

Second, influenza vaccination is the best way to prevent you from getting the flu.

Third, you cannot get sick from getting the flu shot! Some people ...

When learning that you have cancer, it's easy to forget that your body has trillions and trillions of healthy cells. This is true whether the cancer is stage 0 or stage IV. While this may be hard to believe, it is true. Your healthy cells support you in getting through the rigors of treatment. Too often, however, the support that your healthy cells offer is forgotten in the flurry of activities surrounding treatment and the dramatic changes in your everyday life. These changes are not only physical, but emotional, psychological and spiritual. After all, cancer affects the whole person from molecule to spirit.

At the molecular level, your healthy tissues are subjected to profound physiologic demands, demands that take an enormous amount of their energy. Cancer treatments— surgery, chemotherapy, biologic therapies, radiation—are taxing. Athletes need to prepare well for any physically demanding event. Why then, should it be different for cancer survivors? While a far cry from an athletic event, you may be surprised to learn that the same training principles that apply to athletes also apply to cancer survivors. These principles include the correct exercise frequency, intensity, duration and type, tuned individually to your needs as ...

Patients who are well educated about their medical conditions and who use self-management plans created in collaboration with their doctors have better outcomes in a number of chronic medical conditions. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes both chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is no exception. Patients who understand the disease process that causes COPD and who understand their treatment and management plans have fewer emergency room visits, fewer hospitalizations and fewer days with COPD-related symptoms.

If you are one of the 12 million people who know they have COPD, what can you do to have more days without COPD-related symptoms?

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Self breast exams: to do or not to do?

Remember when there were monthly emails you could sign up for to remind you and your friends to do your self breast exams at home? Remember seeing the news anchors talking about their monthly self breast exams in an attempt to remind you to do your breast “due diligence?” What happened to self breast exams and are they still important?

Initially, self breast exams were recommended as a screening tool to help early detection of breast cancer. Unfortunately long-term studies have not confirmed that they actually live up to their hype. Two large studies looking at over 200,000 women in both Russia and China didn’t show any difference in breast cancer mortality after 15 years between the women who were performing routine self exams and those who were not. In fact, the women that were practicing self exams found more lumps and underwent more biopsies for benign reasons. Reviews of several other studies failed to show a benefit of regular breast self-examinations including no benefit of early diagnosis, or reductions in deaths or stage at diagnosis. Hence in 2009, the US Preventative Services Task Force advised that clinicians no longer recommend routine self breast examination as a screening tool for breast cancer detection.

Even though you don’t need to be doing a monthly self exam, you should...

SEATTLE, Sept. 11, 2012 - As they do each year, Seattle magazine and Seattle Met magazines published the results of their annual Top Doctors surveys in their July and August 2012 issues, respectively. To recognize the more than 300 Swedish-affiliated providers who were nominated by their peers for each survey, here is information about both efforts.

There never seem to be enough hours in the day for many of us to get through all of our to-dos. But have you ever considered that the act of trying to cram so much work into such little time is actually counterproductive?

The summer months are often the time of year when many of us afford ourselves a vacation or at least some brief respites from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. A week—or even a few days—can make all the difference, yet so few of us recognize the value in this on a smaller scale. Maybe instead of working, working, working to cash in those vacation days as the weather gets warmer we should be focusing on giving ourselves more regular breaks throughout the day!

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