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WASHINGTON (AP) - Reluctant to get a second opinion? Consider this: Over half of breast cancer patients had their initial treatment changed when they sought a review at a specialty center. But the question remains whether everybody with cancer really needs to go shopping for a second opinion. And if the first two doctors disagree, do you need a tiebreaker?
Better than serial doc-shopping may be what Dr. Michael Sabel, a University of Michigan breast cancer surgeon, calls the team approach. It's where specialists in different aspects of cancer care — the radiologist and pathologist, surgeon, medical oncologist and radiation oncologist — all get together, usually with the patient, to reread all the tests and hash out the best treatment.
That, not run-of-the-mill second opinions, is what Sabel set out to study when he examined what happened to 149 breast cancer patients who, in one year alone, came to Michigan's Comprehensive Cancer Center after being diagnosed, biopsied and getting a treatment recommended from a doctor elsewhere.
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