Description

Breast cancer is a major health problem, with more than one million new cases diagnosed worldwide every year. For reasons that nobody fully understands, breast cancer is becoming more common: in the UK, about 1 in 9 women will develop the condition at some time during their lives. The good news is that cure rates for breast cancer have improved by more than 30 per cent in the past 15 years.

In Coping with Breast Cancer, Dr Terry Priestman provides valuable and accessible information about breast cancer and its treatment. The topics covered include:

• breast cancer in men
• drugs, surgical techniques, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and hormone therapy
• coping with treatment
• how you can help yourself, and the importance of exercise
• fertility and pregnancy
• coping with everyday life, including work, driving, travel, financial help and sex

Coming to terms with a diagnosis of breast cancer is anything but easy, but this helpful book gives reassuring and practical advice about getting on with life as normally as possible. From an acclaimed cancer expert and author of Coping With Chemotherapy, Sheldon Press.

Contents 

• Introduction
• The big questions
• Why me? What causes breast cancer?
• What is breast cancer?
• Breast screening
• How do you know if you've got breast cancer?
• Breast clinics and multi-disciplinary teams
• Surgery
• What happens after surgery? Adjuvant therapy
• Some recent developments
• Advanced breast cancer: when cancer comes back
• Breast cancer in men
• Coping with breast cancer
• Breast cancer and everyday life
• Afterwards
• Useful addresses
• Index

About the author

Terry Priestman is a consultant clinical oncologist working at New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton. He is also medical reviewer for the charity Cancer- backup (which provides information for cancer patients, their relatives and health professionals). He has written more than a hundred papers in the medical press, and is a past Dean of the faculty of Clinical Oncology at the Royal College of Radiologists.