UCLA Breast Center Gets New Chief
Ending a year-and-a-half nationwide search to replace well-known surgeon and patient advocate Dr. Susan Love, the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center announced Wednesday that its new director is Dr. Helena Chang, a researcher and cancer surgeon from Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Chang, 48, who has a doctorate in immunology in addition to her medical degree, was one of more than 50 applicants who sought to run the breast center, which treats 3,900 women a year. She spent her first day on the job Wednesday, and will begin seeing patients Oct. 20.
A sign of the center’s prominence in the fast-growing and politically sensitive areas of breast cancer care and research is that it holds a seat on the board of the National Breast Cancer Coalition in Washington.
Chang is “a strong advocate for women’s health, for women as partners in their own health, and for issues relative to breast cancer,” said Marlene McCarthy, president of the coalition’s Rhode Island chapter. McCarthy said many women attending an interdenominational “healing service” on Monday night sponsored by the coalition mentioned “the positive and encouraging and empowering source of strength that Helena Chang was for them.”
“Some doctors just make you feel like another number,” said one patient, Annette Arrica, a hairdresser in Providence. “But [Chang] talked with me when I had things to ask. She was very kind and compassionate.” Recently, Chang called her at home to let her know she was leaving for Los Angeles. They spoke for half an hour. “She didn’t have to do that,” Arrica said.
Chang played a prominent role in averting so-called “drive-by mastectomies” in Rhode Island, in which health maintenance organizations and insurance companies urge patients to leave the hospital the day after surgery. Testifying before the state legislature earlier this year, Chang said patients needed at least two days to recover and adapt.
The soft-spoken Chang, who was born in Taiwan--her mother was a private school principal, her father a mechanical engineering professor--will inevitably be compared to her outspoken predecessor, Love, a best-selling author and occasionally controversial figure who kept UCLA’s breast center in the spotlight. The two differ on at least one women’s health issue.
In “Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book,” published this year, Love criticizes the growing use of hormone replacement therapy in post-menopausal women, saying evidence of its benefits has been exaggerated and the increased risk of breast cancer downplayed. But Chang generally endorses the treatment. “When used carefully and followed by a physician, I think the risk of breast cancer is minimal” and the treatment “probably is appropriate for many women,” she said.
A physician who knows both Chang and Love, Dr. Douglas Marchant, head of the breast center at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, said Chang was “not of the same outspoken type as [Love],” who “spent a lot of time on the road, like [a] celebrity.” Chang, Marchant added, is perhaps what the UCLA breast center “needed right now, somebody who could restrain herself and focus on doing the job there.”
Chang, who received her PhD (1975) and MD (1981) from Temple University in Philadelphia, stands firm in another dispute, bucking National Cancer Institute statements last year that the costs of routine mammography screening of women in their 40s may outweigh the benefits. “I’m a strong proponent of screening mammography for women in their 40s,” she said.
“I don’t understand too much about politics,” said Chang, who has two children and whose husband is a business consultant. “But in the future I may get more involved.”
