Interview
with Neil Love, MD from Breast Cancer Update for Medical Oncologists,
Program 3 2000
Play
Audio Below:
They
all come in for medical oncology consultation to talk a little bit
about tamoxifen or not. I’m finding in my practice it's about
a 50/50 hit rate for tamoxifen. About half the women who come in
to see me come to the end of those numbers – because it's pretty
easy to share with them the NSABP trial – and they look at
it and they say, "Yep, sounds good to me. I want to go for
it. I want to be very aggressive in my breast cancer management
here." And the other half look at it and think that the numbers
look very small and I guess, in that, they’re probably very
similar to women who come in for true prevention discussions. The
folks who are particularly uninterested are those who had a mastectomy
for treatment of their DCIS because they realize it has no impact
on treatment of their known malignancy, and then they sit around
and think about how important it is to them for the contralateral
breast. Lots of times what people do is they try it for a while.
You know, if they’re very worried about toxicity issues, I
find that anticipation is worse than the experience for a lot of
women. And it seems like they’re awfully worried about going
on it and then, when they come back three months into it, it isn’t
perfect, but the side effect profile is sometimes not what they
were concerned about.
