Medical Oncology at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, NC

Dr. Julia Lawrence is a medical oncologist.
Here, she explains the role of a medical oncologist as part of a multidisciplinary team of caregivers at The Breast Care Center Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
She also talks about the benefits of clinical trials, both to the patient and to the greater understanding of breast cancer treatment.
Learn more about the Breast Care Center: www.wakehealth....
For more information about our breast cancer center and guidance on breast cancer treatment, request an appointment online: www.wakehealth....
TRANSCRIPT: I'm Julia Lawrence, a medical oncologist at Wake Forest Baptist Health. A medical oncologist evaluates women who have a diagnosis of breast cancer to decide about what the likelihood of the cancer spreading and metastasizing and we make decisions about what further therapies to give a woman to manage that. And also in the unfortunate circumstance the breast cancer does metastasize or recur, we're the ones who are primarily involved in caring for the illness at that point in time.
So my practice is all breast cancer. It's what I see every day and what I think about every day and what I do research in every day. So all my educational components are about breast cancer. So that expertise brings a lot to my patients- not just the experience, but keeping up with the latest knowledge.
Chemotherapy is medication that's offered to kill off cancer cells in the stage of a woman first being diagnosed who does not have known metastasis. The role of chemotherapy is to get rid of cells before they have time to grow into a tumor. Another role for chemotherapy is if metastasis has already occurred, it will shrink down a cancer. Fortunately, for breast cancer, because it is a hormonally driven cancer, we don’t need to just rely just on chemotherapy and we have hormonal therapy- which is better-tolerated. It's a way of blocking a woman's estrogen and is another form of therapy that improves quality of life without the side effects of chemotherapy. And lastly within breast cancer, we're very fortunate that we have newer therapies that are called biologics- or more targeted therapy that have less side effects than chemotherapy and really bring a lot of promise to improvement in therapy for women with breast cancer.
We conduct many clinical trials for breast cancer at Wake Forest Baptist Health. Many of our trials have to do with cancer treatment. Some of them are trials that we only are conducting here- but the vast majority of them are clinical trials that are conducted across the country. There, to impact on breast cancer we really need the cooperation of many medical centers to get many women involved in clinical trials to see a difference and we make a big effort to contribute to that work as well.
Women have really contributed enormously to clinical trials for breast cancer and as a result, we really have made across decades magnificent strides in improvements in longevity and survival for breast cancer. As a result, clinical trials today really address the gaps in our knowledge.
At Wake Forest Baptist Health, we offer multidisciplinary breast cancer care in an academic setting. The importance of the academic component is research as well as education. We have a whole spectra of physicians-in-training who are questioning us and that helps keep me on my toes. And we all come together to see that patients when they're newly diagnosed with cancer. The patients are seen in a clinical setting. With that, they can see both radiation, surgery, and medical oncology on a one-day visit or if that's too overwhelming at least we're all discussing the patient and are aware of the patient at the same time and then sometimes we schedule the patients on subsequent visits to see us.

[@courhart2265]

Very erudite in her field.