Robert Whitfield MD explains how breast reconstruction has changed from older mastectomy methods to modern options like DIEP free flap and aesthetic flat closure. He covers the difference between removing one breast or both, and how lymph node sampling guides treatment decisions.
There is a variety of ways to do breast reconstruction. And yesterday I was actually joking about. I'm old enough to have done all the surgeries before we had some of the. More from. From a tech standpoint, before we had some of the very cool things that we do now routinely. So. Other things happened while I was in training, certainly were the coming to fruition of doing instead of modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer with axillary lymph node dissection, which was the standard of care when I started training to a lumpectomy and a sentinel lymph node biopsy, followed by radiation therapy, comas. But going forward for breasts, we did a lot of the newer techniques for breast Reconstruction, which in 2005, basically when I started teaching, was called a DIEP freeform. The types of reconstructions are, you know, first and foremost, anesthetic flat closure, which is a form of reconstruction. And so I think, you know, what everybody should understand is when someone gets a mastectomy, especially bilateral mastectomies, those are different operations per side. Usually cancer is not on both sides, and one side will have a more aggressive or intense surgery taking more tissue on the cancer side. That's pretty cool. They'll always be sampling lymph nodes, and that helps, you know, set forth how they're going to therapeutically take care of the patient afterwards. Is the patient going to need chemotherapy? Is the patient going to get radiation therapy?
