Sara McLaughlin, M.D., Surgical Oncologist, Department of Surgery: The goal is the more targeted things that we can give you, the more things that are really specific to your cancer and to your body, the better the outcome is going to be. We have a large number of really targeted therapies which minimize the damage to good cells, if you will. They target the bad cells. So women come to the office that they're very scared, they don't know what to do, and my job is to really help them navigate the overwhelming amount of data related to breast cancer, what they hear on the internet, what they hear from their friends, what they get from media, and try to help distill that down into what is the right decision for them.

You should meet with all of the members and the providers of the team and understand that as you make decisions, how one decision impacts the next decision. And then how do we create a treatment plan that addresses all of those issues?

What I think is perfect about the Mayo Clinic is that you have all of your providers in a truly integrated, multidisciplinary environment under one roof, in one medical record. There are certain benchmarks that we consider to be the minimum standards of care. So you would want to know the volume of cancer that that institution is treating. All of the providers that patients see are in fact breast specialists. This is truly their passion. Where they focus their research, where they think about, you know, these nuances in the care day in and day out.

The innovations that happen, that are supported and fostered by the Mayo Clinic are really unsurpassed in most other medical centers. And that happens not just from the imaging perspective at the beginning, but the clinical trials that are available with respect to vaccinations and immunotherapy. The data and the science is so robust, it's so dynamic, it's changing all the time. And I would say really where we've gone was from this pendulum of more is better to maybe less is okay with the same outcomes and fewer side effects from the entire gamut of disease.