Beating the Odds
Carole O'Toole was diagnosed with IBC in 1994. Despite the fact that the cancer had not metastasized, she was given 18 months to live. Her treatment regimen was brutal: five months of almost continuous chemotherapy, followed by a modified radical mastectomy and a bone-marrow transplant.
After undergoing treatment, O'Toole — a scientific researcher by profession — embarked on a mission to discover everything she could about IBC and complementary medical therapies to support her recovery. What she learned and what she did for herself — from guided imagery to spiritual work to vitamin therapy — is explained in her book, Healing Outside the Margins.
"Complementary therapy offered me the emotional and spiritual support I needed, and physically nurtured my body through its medical ordeal," writes O'Toole, who eight years after her grim prognosis is coaching other cancer patients on how to structure complementary treatment plans.
Treating IBC
IBC patients with better-than-average survival rates like Carole O'Toole's are becoming more common, says Dr. Tripathy. That's because patients are more aware of IBC and physicians are making the right diagnosis the first time around, which is critical given IBC's rapid growth pattern. (IBC's symptoms mimic those of mastitis, a breast infection, so it has not been unusual for a woman with IBC to be prescribed antibiotics before being correctly diagnosed).
Clinical trials have shown that the most successful treatment for IBC is chemotherapy to shrink the tumor to an operable size, followed by a modified mastectomy to reduce the total number of cancer cells and radiation to kill remaining cancer cells. Combinations of these therapies have resulted in about 30 percent of patients surviving greater than five years without a recurrence.
In recent years, the use of very aggressive therapies, namely bone-marrow transplant and high-dose chemotherapy, has fallen out of favor. The results of these hard-hitting treatments, says Dr. Tripathy "are not necessarily better than what we see with standard protocols."
