Friday 20 December 2013

Lessons from history #9: mastectomy

In the early days of surgery, surgeons tried to out do each other in their ability to perform bigger operations, and mastectomy was no exception. For breast cancer, excising the tumour seemed like logical treatment, at least for local control. It also seemed logical that if some excision was good, more excision was better. So simple tumour excision soon gave way to simple mastectomy, which gave way to total mastectomy, which gave way to radical mastectomy, which gave way to things like the ‘extended’ radical mastectomy and the ‘supra-radical’ mastectomy (which included excising the chest wall, amongst other things). Yet, all of this effort was done without properly evaluating the effectiveness – it was all based on what seemed like a good idea.