After Breast Cancer Diagnosis: Do Your Homework! Online Research Can Help You Understand Your Treatment Options

If you have been diagnosed with breast cancer, doctors and other medical professionals are always standing by ready to give counsel, advice, and support. But is this enough? Should anyone who has been diagnosed with any serious disease simply rely on their doctors as their sole source of information? Or should they research their illness on their own in addition to relying on expert input?

Fortunately, the Internet now makes it easy for anyone to research any question. Any woman diagnosed with breast cancer will be able to find an enormous amount of information and dialogue online about this disease. And the truth is, no matter how hard they try to keep current and to answer all the questions of their patients, doctors may not know everything there is to know about breast cancer. Ultimately, your life is your own and no one else’s, so it is really your responsibility to educate yourself and not rely on others to do all of the work for you, even if they are supposedly the experts.

Conventional treatments and their side effects: getting the full story
Medical science has settled on a protocol for breast cancer treatment that normally includes chemotherapy, radiation and lumpectomy or mastectomy, as well as the occasional new treatment that has been fully vetted at well-known medical research institutes (such as hormone therapy, for example). There is no doubt that doctors use these methods because they have been successful in reducing mortality from breast cancer. However, because they rely on these methods so heavily and are so convinced of their necessity, doctors may have a tendency to overlook the potential severity of side effects, or to not emphasize or explain them properly when discussing things with their patients.

Radiation therapy, for example, has long been associated with the development of heart problems later in life. Claims are often made that improved techniques have ameliorated radiation damage to the heart, but the kind of long-term studies necessary to demonstrate this have not been done because these techniques are still new. Chemotherapy causes permanent damage to the heart, lungs and kidneys, while weakening the immune system and leaving women vulnerable to other disorders such as shingles. Tamoxifen, used for targeted therapy with estrogen-receptor positive cancers, can cause blood clots, vision problems, hot flashes, and night sweats, among other serious symptoms.

The attitude of doctors about these treatments is that breast cancer is the immediate threat to health and must be treated first, which is understandable and a legitimate perspective. From your standpoint, however, it is critically important that you know all of the details about potential side effects of any treatment you may be receiving, including those treatments that are new and innovative and perhaps still somewhat unfamiliar to even most medical professionals. You need to know what might happen to you once you start any treatment, so you will know what you should report to your doctors and what it might all mean if you start experiencing certain things. Many breast cancer patients have complained that they were not adequately warned by medical professionals ahead of time about all possible side effects, so it is incumbent on you to do your own research on this question at each and every step of your treatment protocol.