Our multidisciplinary treatment model brings together doctors with different areas of expertise so that they can find the treatment that works best for you. This means you may have one treatment or many treatments.
Our job is to treat the woman who has breast cancer, not just cancer. The best health outcomes can only happen when treatment fits into your life, rather than the other way around.
To help make sure you can focus on the important things, we have resources available to help you with non-medical needs, from transportation to housing. BMC can also help facilitate care for anyone without insurance or whose insurance may not cover the care they need. Talk to your doctor to learn more.
Throughout your treatment, we encourage you to keep moving forward with your normal life as much as possible. Our goal is to get you to a cure, and we want you to be ready when you get there.
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Diagnostic Tests
Bone Scans
Bone scans involve a low dose of radioactive material that is injected into a vein. Bone attracts this material. Concentrated areas show up on the scan and are referred to as "hot spots." Hot spots may be indicative of a variety of diseases and conditions.
Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, uses magnets and radio waves to make very precise cross-sectional pictures of the body. For breast MRI, you will lay face-down in a narrow tube with openings for your breasts.
Ultrasound uses sound waves to produce an outline of part of the body. A computer picks up the echoes from the sound waves and uses them to generate a picture on the computer screen.
Chest x-rays provide an image of the heart, lungs, airways, blood vessels and bones in the spine and chest area. They can be used to look for broken bones, diseases like pneumonia, abnormalities, or cancer.
CT scans use X-ray equipment and computer processing to produce 2-dimensional images of the body. The patient lies on a table and passes through a machine that looks like a large, squared-off donut.
A painless procedure where gel is placed on affected area and a handheld device is moved across it in order to obtain a picture of the blood flow in the body.
A mammogram is an x-ray of the breast that uses a small amount of radiation. A technologist will position your breast for the test. The breast will be compressed between two plates, and a picture will be taken.
Most women with breast cancer will have some type of breast surgery as part of their treatment plan. There are several types of surgery, including surgery to remove the cancer, surgery to see whether the cancer has spread, surgery to reconstruct the breast after it or part of it has been removed and surgery to relieve the symptoms of advanced cancer.
Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) removes only part of the breast. How much of the breast is removed depends on the size of the tumor and where it is located. The medical term for this kind of surgery is a partial (or segmental) mastectomy. It is also called a lumpectomy or quadrantectomy.
Chemotherapy is a medication or combination of medications used to treat cancer. Chemotherapy can be given orally (as a pill) or injected intravenously (IV).
Hormone therapy is used to treat cancers that are hormone receptor-positive (meaning there are hormone receptors present in the cells). Breast cancers can be estrogen receptor-positive (ER-positive), progesterone receptor-positive (PR-positive) or both (referred to simply as hormone receptor-positive). The female hormone estrogen can fuel cancer growth. Hormone therapy drugs block the effects of estrogen or lower its levels.
For patients with advanced-stage melanoma, immunotherapy may improve the body’s natural immune response to cancer. Immunotherapy recruits the body’s own immune system and uses it to fight cancer all over the body, making it difficult for cancer cells to hide or develop defenses against it. Immunotherapy has the potential to keep working even after the patient has completed treatment.
If the physician performs a sentinel lymph node biopsy, and cancer is found in the sentinel nodes, it is likely a lymph node dissection will be advised to remove the other lymph nodes in the area.
Some breast cancer patients may need lymph node surgery. Lymph node surgery is performed for staging purposes to find out whether the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes under the arm (axillary lymph nodes). One or more lymph nodes may be removed for examination under a microscope in one of two ways: an axillary lymph node dissection or a sentinel lymph node biopsy.
Mastectomy removes the whole breast. There are multiple types of mastectomy. The two most common types of mastectomy are simple (total) mastectomy and modified radical mastectomy. A simple mastectomy removes just the breast. When the lymph nodes underneath the arm (called the axillary lymph nodes) are removed in addition to the breast, it is called a modified radical mastectomy.
A biopsy is when your doctor removes a small piece of tissue from an organ, muscle, or growth. Biopsies of your organs or muscles can be used for to diagnose various conditions or abnormalities, including cancers, inflammatory diseases, and more. In some cases, a biopsy may remove the entirety of the abnormal tissue.
Percutaneous ethanol injection uses ethanol, a type of alcohol, to destroy cancer cells. The physician guides the ethanol directly into the tumor using ultrasound. Generally, this procedure only requires local anesthesia. If the patient has multiple tumors, it may require general anesthesia.
