The Breast Cancer Answers Book: Your Guide to Achieving Emotional Reconstruction(R) - Paperback

Gapen, Phyllis: - PHYLLIS GAPEN was a Houston-based journalist who survived breast cancer for twenty-four years. She worked to help generate a vision of how new technology, clinical research, creatively organized medical care, and human compassion can push forward science and medical practice. For more than fifteen years, Phyllis worked with a university team whose engineers helped build advanced Internets for educational and research efforts in Texas. Among other things, that work improved the commodity Internet used by the public. These efforts enabled better transmission of sound and pictures over the Internet, eliminating jerky movements in video playback, and paving the way for popular sites such as YouTube. Better networks also assisted health care professionals in bring- ing innovations to the practice of medicine. The video-based breast cancer website Breast Cancer Answers is just one example of such advances. During her career, Phyllis published more than 100 articles in national publications, including The Wall Street Journal. She edited three books, and her work has been cited in fifteen books on health and science policy. Phyllis often wrote about groups of patients who have difficulty advocating for themselves. She dreamed of a time when cancer therapies would be less toxic, and large numbers of patients would go on to live long, productive lives.Harness, Jay K.: - JAY K. HARNESS, MD, FACS, a past president of The American Society of Breast Surgeons and Breast Surgery International, works full time in private practice as a breast surgeon in Orange, California. He currently serves as a clinical professor of surgery at University of California, Irvine. For twenty-eight years, Dr. Harness worked in full-time academic general surgery at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Tufts University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. For the past three decades, Dr. Harness has advocated for a multidisciplinary team approach to the treatment of breast cancer. He served as the founding medical director of the University of Michigan's Breast Care Center (BCC) in 1985. The Michigan BCC became one the first academic multidisciplinary breast cancer programs in the United States. His first book, Breast Cancer: Collaborative Management, promoted multidisciplinary care. Subsequently, Dr. Harness established and directed similar breast cancer programs in Boston and Orange, California. In 2011 Dr. Harness cofounded Breast Cancer Answers (breastcanceranswers.com), a website designed for patients and their families. This site introduced the first social media program for breast cancer patients, and it provides information from breast cancer experts that can be accessed anonymously and for free. Visitors will find a searchable library of informative videos with answers to questions raised by women with breast cancer.