Customer Reviews

Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book

5 star:		(87)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First I want to say that Dr. Love's book is not limited to information about breast cancer but has extensive information on all aspects of breasts.

I was given a copy of Dr. Love's book after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it became invaluable to me. Frequently I had to set it aside for a short time because the information was so frightening, but cancer and its' treatment is a frightening experience.

The information she provided allowed me to ask important questions and make good decisions about the choices available to me. I had good doctors, but they did not go into some of the details I needed to know such as: odds of recurrence with lumpectomy vs. mastectomy; which chemotherapy drugs produced what side effects; why radiation?

She also provided information that allowed me to better understand the idiosyncrasies of breast cancer and my particular prognosis.

Breast cancer research is producing such promise with new drugs and procedures, that there is no way a book can be published with "the latest" information. Still, I HIGHLY recommend Dr. Love's book to ALL women--whether they are interested in breast feeding or are facing difficult decisions about breast cancer treatment options.

This is probably the most comprehensive source of information on breast cancer and other breast issues that most of us will ever find, and it manages to avoid the cloying "good girl" kitch of those horrid pink websites. For those reasons, it is the best place to start educating yourself. Buy it.

BUT, be aware that it has a few major faults. Dr. Love spends a great deal of time pointing out the side effects of the three major treatments: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Many of these side effects are not temporary or fixable, but are permanent and life threatening in themselves. This is especially valuable knowledge since most doctors and those pink websites downplay or totally ignore disabling and potentially fatal problems such as lymphedema, secondary cancers and heart failure which can result from these standard treatments. I strongly suspect that all the attention paid to hair loss (which will grown back in, for crying out loud) is there to distract potential patients from the real problems.

Dr. Love also lays bare the dismal statistics on the efficacy of chemotherapy given to non-metastatic women (2-9% of women are actually helped - an eye opening figure to most of us who probably thought chemo "saved" 50 or 60 women per hundred). These are not statistics that the pink groups or your oncologist are eager to have you know.

However, after spending pages and pages warning us that chemo is dangerous and not especially effective, she then just says "Oh, but go ahead and have it." Why? After imparting so much frightening information, I'm not following her thought process as to why chemo is a good deal for non-metastatic women, and I think she owes her readers a fuller explanation of why she, and the rest of the American medical community, have come to this conclusion.

In addition, although she loves statistics (and so do I), she too often lapses into anecdotes that are frightening or bizarre or in other ways not very helpful. She also, at very critical times, as in discussing heart damage from radiation and chemotherapy, abandons statistics altogether and just says "seldom" or "infrequently". Well, what does that mean? 2-9% of women helped qualifies as "seldom" in my mind, yet to Dr. Love those are great statistics to gamble on and accept chemo.

Lastly, remember that Dr. Love is still a doctor, she is not your best gal pal, and as such, has a very different way of assessing the treatment plans. One of the most chilling anecdotes in the book is when she refers to a (non-metastatic) patient of hers who underwent chemo (2-9% efficacy rate) and ended up needing a heart transplant thanks to Adriamycin. Dr. Love just shrugs it off with, well at least she was alive to need the heart transplant, with no concern for the quality of life this woman was left with.

In sum, there is much good information here, but you will need to search for some specific answers elsewhere. And the knowledge she does give you may make it harder, not easier, to make decisions. But knowledge is always harder than trusting ignorance.

This book is promoted as the best book to use for breast cancer. It is not. Skip the book, and visit the website to see photographs of women who have gone through the surgeries. The first half of the book is about basic breast anatomy and development, and not about the choices needed now. The second half of the book suffers from three problems: old statistics that do not take into account changes in treatment, too much detail on rare complications and types of disease, and too much detail about recurrence. Not recommended.

The most serious flaw is that it uses outdated survival and mortality statistics that do not take into account the current treatment protocols. The result is unnecessary fear and panic. There are no good statistics on ten-year survival rates, because the current treatment protocols have not been in use for ten years. The development of changes in chemotherapy, antibodies, and hormonal therapy is changing so rapidly that for at least the next twenty years there will be no good ten-year survival rate statistics. Even the five-year statistics do not give the current picture. Dr. Love only gives one paragraph's worth of guidance on how to interpret the statistics. This can result in resignation and fear, just when one should be preparing to live well and fight hard.

The second flaw is that Dr. Love's frustrations with the imperfections of medicine and the slowness of change of the medical system come through. She spends lots of detail on rare complications of surgery, and rare possibilities of recurrence. She agonizes over the fact that any lives are lost. I want that knowledge and compassion in your team. I do not want to sift through this detail when I need to get information on which to base decisions.

The final difficulty is not a flaw, but a portion of the book. As a newly diagnosed survivor, I wanted to know what I should do next, what will happen next, and how I can detect any recurrences. Ido not need an entire section for women who have recurrences. Fewer than half of women who have breast cancer get recurrences, and right now, I need to concentrate on what I can do to prevent one, not how soon to arrange for hospice in case of recurrence.

Instead, try John Link's Survival Manual, or, best of all, Your Breast Cancer Journey from the American Cancer Society

I bought this book for my sister when she was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago. This became a bible to her - she referred to it at every point - surgery, radiation & chemotherapy and every set-back during treatment. She lives in the UK and had me send several books to her friends and later to her gynocologist (all diagnosed with breast cancer). The gynocologist believes it to be the best book written on breast cancer.

Low and behold if I wasn't also diagnosed with breast cancer this year. This is a huge book and I found I could only read the parts that were significant to me at the time. Knowledge is power - and this book definitely gives every reader this! It gives strength to make decisions and understand the options. Dr. Love explains how some women choose not to follow treatments recommended - and how they still survive. Yet, how others follow standard treatment and for no rhyme or reason the cancer returns. (There were just a couple of examples mentioned). Dr. Love gives you all the facts. I did not find her book scary - I want to know whatever I can! There are many charts giving info on studies. I found the chart showing the recommended treatments were right on for what both my sister and I were recommended.

Without a doubt I feel that Dr. Love's book (and her Website with live chats with specialists) has helped me tremendously. I am sure I would have felt lost without this help. I highly recommend this book!

Like many of the other reviewers, I picked up Dr Love's book (1st edition) when I was diagnosed and undergoing treatment for Breast cancer. (I then picked up the 2nd edition when going through a recurrance "scare", a year or so later.)

I found her text exhaustive but not exhausting. She's a straight shooter which I found essential when people are reluctant to give you hard truths.

I read several books throughout my treament, I continue to keep an eye on the literature even though I've been cancer free for 3.5+ years. My opinion is unchanged. If you can only buy one book, buy this one!

re: the previous reviewer who didn't appreciate the "horror" stories of unlikely recurrances and cases of extremely fast progression. Dr Love was making the point that cancer can be unpredictable. She therefore refuses to predict how long a patient has to live. In addition to the "scary" examples, she gave several encouraging examples of people who according to conventional wisdom should have been dead long ago but continue to defy the odds.

This is the first book I bought when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It is the "bible" for women with the disease, and recommended by them for newly diagnosed women. And so many breast cancer patients can't be wrong.

The book is chock full of great information. But for those of us diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, that information is so scarey and hopeless sounding that I began to wonder if I should even bother with treatment! I would never recommend the Breast Book for an IBC patient. (In fact, I warn them off, and I have talked with other women with IBC who had my same reaction.) I agree that it's important to be a "straight shooter" and give all the information, but to deny hope is a terrible thing -- especially in a field where the odds change every day, as new drugs and treatment regimens are discovered and implemented. No book on breast cancer will ever be truly "up to date." By the time it's published and available to readers, the research is at least a year old. But if Dr. Love wants to tell us how grim our outlook is, she also needs to point that out. (In fact, by the time I was diagnosed her book was sadly out of date with regard to IBC survival rates, which had skyrocketed with new treatments.)

So, yes, a very good reference book, but one to be avoided by women newly diagnosed with IBC (and perhaps some other advanced breast cancers).

This is an excellent book, and well worth reading. But it's probably the second book to read, behind "The Breast Cancer Survival Manual : A Step-By-Step Guide for the Woman With Newly Diagnosed Cancer" by John Link.

My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer on January 5th of this year. Fortunately, she found it herself, through self-checking, and we live in an area where two of the world's best breast cancer treatment groups are located - the Breast Care Center in Orange, CA and the Memorial Care group in Long Beach. As of yesterday, we were fortunate to discover that, eleven months later, through a combination of surgeries and chemotherapy, the scans that were done last week on the liver, lungs and bones all came back negative, so we hope to have many more years together.

Dr. John Link is the friend of a friend and we consulted with him on treatment. As part of the consultation, he also gave us a copy of his book, which is very readable and understandable. It's particularly good at giving guidance on how to put together a treament program that's right for you as an individual.

The Susan Love book is excellent, particularly as a reference for all the information you want to know when your life or the life of someone you love is at risk. The difference between the two is that the Link book provides a great overview and a guide for getting treatment, and the Love book is the reference for all the stuff that you want to look up when you have a question. And if you're like us, you'll have lots of questions because this is all very complex and it's very difficult to decide on what the best approach will be for your individual situation.

After my devastating diagnosis of breast cancer 6 months ago, my surgeon recommended this book to me. It answered almost every question I had regarding my treatment options. It's a lot to digest all at once, so I have just been reading it chapters as they come up in my life. The surgery section is very helpful, and details the whole process from beginning to end. Dr. Love doesn't sugar-coat anything, so some of the information can be hard to digest, but if you are looking for honest, straightforward answers, this book is very helpful.

I am a 39 year old mother of four teenagers. In April of 1998 I was diagnosed with Lobular Carcinoma in Situ (LCIS) in my left breast. Boy, was I really scared. My mother died from breast cancer. I was introduced to "Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book" when I went to see my doctor about a lump in my "right" breast that had suddenly appeared six weeks before, it turned out to be benign. It was the then, undetected, accidentally discovered "mass" in my "left" breast that had LCIS! I underwent a fine needle aspiration which led to an excisional biopsy in each breast, and am now fine with no further treatment necessary. At the very on-set, my surgeon recommended Dr. Love's book to help me completely understand LCIS and what to expect during surgery and after. I found Dr. Love's book to be extremly helpful in allaying my fears and dispelling my misconceptions about breast cancer. Her book is very detailed, direct, honest, and compassionate. The chapter on LCIS with its diagrams took me step by step through the process of what was about to happen to me, from surgery, to recovery, to the emotions that I would experience. There were no surprises! My surgeon keeps a copy of Dr. Love's book in his waiting room on the table at all times and always recommends this book to his patients. I now recommend Dr. Love's book to my family, friends, and my other doctors too. Thank you, Dr. Love, for taking away my fear of "not knowing"!

I bought this book when my partner was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago at age 32. We have both relied on it as a source of information throughout her treatment, and it has served that purpose well-- it is very complete and up-to-date. This book is often referred to as a "bible" for women with breast cancer, and I can see why.

However, we both found this book profoundly frightening in a way that we did not find other breast cancer books-- even ones that cover similar material. I think this may be because, unlike the authors of most breast cancer books, Dr. Love has not had cancer herself. As compassionate as she may be in person, her tone as a writer is sometimes cavalier. I am sure that as an MD she has had to distance herself in order to treat women with breast cancer, and unfortunately this distance comes through in her book. At first I thought that my reaction to her writing and her statistics was just because the diagnosis was so new and frightening-- but it's still true now, a year later.

This is a fabulous resource-- probably the best-- but don't read it alone, or when you're feeling particularly scared or pessimistic.