Thoracic surgeon Matthew Bott outlines his reasons to be hopeful in the setting of lung or esophageal cancer at MSK, including late stage treatments, minimally invasive surgery, and a focus on the emotional as well as physical needs of his patients.
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How are you doing? Dr. Bott, nice to see you again.
After patients speak with me, I hope that they feel comforted, that we've alleviated a lot of the anxiety and worry around their potential diagnosis, and they feel confident in the plan moving forward. My name is Matthew Bott. I'm a thoracic surgeon at MSK. I treat just about any cancer in the chest.
How are you feeling?
What I do is reassure patients that we have really good options for whatever the situation is that they're faced with.
We're going to look at the rest of the lung just to make sure that there's nothing concerning.
There's a lot of reasons to be hopeful in the setting of lung or esophageal cancer. The important thing for patients to keep in mind is that many of those diseases are easily treatable if you catch them early.
Minimally invasive surgery has really become a critical component of what we do, and patients are having surgery through smaller incisions that get better faster and in general, they do better in the long run. Even in patients who are not necessarily candidates for surgery, we have a lot of new, exciting treatments that are quite effective in terms of controlling the disease even at later stages.
No evidence of infection.
Treating the entire patient is an important part of what we do. There are a number of different ways that we do that. Taking care of the body obviously is important, right? That's sort of the heart of medicine, but the other side of it is taking care of the emotional needs of the patients, which can vary. It goes back to listening and being an ally in the process of what can otherwise be a very stressful experience.
Everybody at MSK really believes in the mission of MSK, which is to specifically care for patients with cancer and really to do it better than anywhere else. Being a part of that, bringing treatments from the clinic to the patients, is a really powerful experience.