Doctor Shares Key Advice for Supporting Breast Cancer Patients

Dr. Elisa Port, who leads the breast surgery division at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, has spent her career treating women with breast cancer. What she's learned from them—not from textbooks, but from the lived experience of diagnosis and recovery—forms the backbone of her new book, released in May 2026. One piece of wisdom stands out as almost counterintuitive: if you've survived breast cancer yourself and a friend is now walking that same path, do not tell her to do what you did.

The reason is simple but profound. No two cases of breast cancer are identical anymore. Treatment protocols have fractured into dozens of variations based on tumor type, genetic markers, hormone sensitivity, and individual health profiles. What saved one woman's life may not be the right approach for another. Port emphasizes this shift away from the old one-size-fits-all medicine as a genuine advance. What matters instead is presence. Show up. Listen. Be there without prescribing.

The statistics that frame this advice are sobering. Breast cancer remains the most common cancer diagnosed in women. One in eight women will develop it at some point in her life. What surprises many people, Port notes, is that the vast majority of these cases occur in women with no family history of the disease. This means all women carry the risk, regardless of their genetics. More than four million women in the United States are living as breast cancer survivors, managing the aftermath of diagnosis and treatment while navigating ongoing health decisions.

Beyond supporting those already diagnosed, Port addresses prevention—the strategies women can actually control. She frames them as the four Ws. Weight matters because being overweight or obese increases breast cancer risk alongside other cancers. Wine, her euphemism for all alcohol, requires a harder truth than the old "moderation" messaging suggested. Current evidence indicates that when it comes to cancer prevention, zero alcohol consumption is safer than moderate drinking. Walking provides genuine benefits for both body and mind, but it's not sufficient on its own. The fourth W is working out—the harder exercise that walking alone cannot replace. Running, swimming, weight-bearing exercises: these are the activities that actually move the needle on cancer risk reduction.

Port also addresses a more complicated prevention question: menopause hormone therapy. She calls it a super important tool for women suffering through the symptoms that can wreck quality of life—the sleeplessness, the hot flushes, the disruption to daily functioning. She believes it should be considered for most women, particularly those without elevated breast cancer risk. But the calculus shifts when you look at the numbers. Menopause hormone therapy does increase breast cancer risk, though modestly. In the average woman, the risk rises from 10 to 12 percent to 12 to 14 percent. It's not enormous, but it's real and worth weighing against the relief the therapy provides.

For women who already have breast cancer, the equation changes entirely. Most breast cancers are hormone-sensitive, meaning they feed on estrogen and progesterone. Adding hormone therapy would be counterproductive—throwing fuel on the fire, as Port puts it. These women typically stop hormone therapy if they were using it, prioritizing cancer control over symptom management. The larger message underlying all of this advice is that breast cancer care and prevention have become deeply individualized. There is no universal answer, only the right answer for each woman, arrived at through honest conversation with her doctor and support from the people around her.