Perspective of Patient Advocacy

Abstract

Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) for decades has been a small paragraph narrative in medical journals. “Doctors learn about it in medical school, but most never see a patient”, stated one breast oncologist when urged to explain why IBC is misdiagnosed and misunderstood so often. Through the looking glass of time we know those same doctors probably did see patients who presented with clinical symptoms, but believing that IBC was so rare, they, the physicians, disregarded the possibility. Only with the advent of the internet with information at the fingertips of anyone with a computer, has this deadly disease been brought out of the dusty tombs of literature and now is being looked at under a microscope. Between a defiant retired reporter whose daughter tried to fight the odds, and an active reporter that pushed the camera lights into those unilluminated recesses of medical knowledge did the world sit up and take a closer look at what was once thought to be too rare to even contemplate.