What I Tell My Own Patients About Breast Health

If you've spent any time with me, you know I'm not the kind of provider who hands you a pamphlet and sends you on your way.

I ask questions. I want to know what's going on in your life, not just your labs.

And when something is weighing on a patient, I want to understand it well enough to actually help, not just well enough to check a box and move on.

Breast health comes up a lot in my practice. More than people might expect. And over time I've noticed that most women are carrying around the same handful of concerns, quietly, without quite knowing who to bring them to.

So today I want to share what I actually tell my patients when the subject comes up. Not the clinical version. The real version.

This is the thing I find myself saying most often, and I mean it every time.

So many women use family history as their primary measure of whether they need to pay attention. No mother with breast cancer, no aunt, no sister, so they assume they're in a lower risk category and they can relax a little.

I understand why. It's a reasonable shortcut. But it's not the whole picture.

The truth is that the vast majority of women who develop breast cancer have no family history of it at all. No genetic marker. No obvious warning sign.

It is far more common than most people realize for this to come completely out of the blue.

I'm not telling you this to scare you. I'm telling you because I want you to take your breast health seriously regardless of your family tree.

Because you deserve that level of attention, and because catching anything early, if there is anything to catch, is always better than the alternative.

When a patient gets a normal mammogram result, I'm glad. I really am.

But I also know that a normal result answers a specific question, and it doesn't always answer the question the patient actually had.

It doesn't tell you whether your dense breast tissue is making that image harder to read.

It doesn't tell you whether your hormonal history is a factor worth thinking about.

It doesn't tell you whether the thing you noticed last month is worth mentioning to someone.

Normal means there's nothing acutely alarming on that particular image on that particular day. It doesn't mean you have a full picture of your breast health. And for a lot of women, the full picture is what they were really looking for.

If you leave a mammogram with questions still unanswered, those questions are worth asking somewhere.

This one is close to my heart, because it applies to women's health broadly, not just breast health.

If something feels off, that matters.

If you have a concern that three different people have waved away, and you're still not at peace with it, that matters too. Your body knows things. Your instincts about your own health are not nothing.

I have seen too many women apologize for bringing up a concern, as if noticing something about their own body is an inconvenience. It is not an inconvenience. It is exactly what you should be doing.

A good provider listens to that. A good appointment makes room for it. If you haven't had that experience yet, you deserve to.

I'll be honest with you. For a long time, when patients came to me with breast health concerns that went beyond my scope, I didn't have a great answer for where to send them.

The conventional system is good at acute findings. It is not always great at the kind of thorough, unhurried, personalized conversation I just described.

That's exactly why I was so glad when Dr. Bill Hoagland came on board with us here at At The Well Health. He spent 40 years in breast surgery. He has seen and reviewed more breast health cases than almost anyone practicing in Louisville today. And he now has something that career rarely gave him: time to actually sit with a patient and go through her full picture.

If you have questions about your breast health that haven't been fully answered, I genuinely think a conversation with him is worth your time. Not because something is necessarily wrong, but because you deserve clarity, and he is very good at providing it.

You can request an appointment with him right here on our site.

As always, I'm here too if you want to talk it through first.

With love,

Becca

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