So, how does one find a good HDR doctor?
Well, it's a little bit challenging. I'm very proud of the program that we developed at
UCLA. I dedicated to myself to brachytherapy—my practice to brachytherapy—and since 1991,
high dose-rate brachytherapy, and it's quite a program to set up. As I mentioned earlier, it requires
specialty nurses, specialty physicists, therapists, dosimetrists, the operating room team, the
doctors. It's a village. It's not just one person going in and doing this treatment and
at UCLA we have a staff of three full-time brachytherapy physicians in addition to myself.
I'm now part-time. We have physician's assistants, nursing assistants, and just really a great
team and a great facility with CT scanner, a dedicated CT scanner—one of the few types
of CT scanners that fits over the patients with a large bore. We are getting an MRI scanner
right there in the department as well as the operating suite to make it very comfortable.
So we have a level of expertise. We're doing a large volume of cases and as well known,
in order to do a good job, you really need to be doing a lot of cases. So we have experience
not only in prostate cancer (which is the number one disease that we treat) but in head
and neck, and GYN, and some of the other sites that I mentioned earlier. This is a very very
busy program. It does require training and experience and since there are so few programs
in the United States, it's hard to get the training, So, I'm pleased to say that the
current chairman—or director—of the program was trained by a colleague I trained at UC
San Francisco. So, that's Albert Chang. We trained Dr. Puja Venkat who's just a fantastic
young doctor and enthusiastic in brachytherapy. And Dr. Alan Lee. Those are our three young—at
least by my standards—younger doctors who are doing a great job at UCLA and promoting
and developing, working with interventional radiologists, treating special sites in the
body that were previously not treated with brachytherapy before like liver and deep-seeded
tissues and so forth, as well as doing a fantastic job on the prostate cancer program—one of
the best in the country.
Wow. So, I know you've trained a lot of people in your department, but can you speak to all
the other places you've trained? You've trained a lot of people.
Well, I have. I've felt that training and education and trying to get as many people
familiar with brachytherapy as possible because it's such an effective treatment modality
and since you have to have both surgical and radiation training that makes it a challenge
and with HDR, you know, the rest of the equipment and personnel that go with it also have to
have that training, but I've trained residents from Stanford, from UCLA, the director at
UC San Francisco I trained, various doctors throughout the country, people from international
sites, various countries from Italy or Egypt, or wherever, England, wherever come over and
spend various amounts of time. So, I've welcomed training anybody from a physician in practice
down through medical students who are wide-eyed and very curious about what we're doing.
Outside of UCLA, do you have any other trusted sites outside of the country if people are
maybe on the east coast and looking for HDR?
Yeah, there are certain places that have more levels of expertise. I'd be happy to provide
you a list. I'd rather not sort of try and name a long list here, but sure, there are
sites that are good colleagues and have good track records and are dedicated physicians
and those are the kinds of people I'd be happy to refer you to.
So, if you would like more information about anything we talked about, you can go ahead
and contact our Helpline team and they will be available to talk to you. The number is
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