Bethany B. Tan, M.D., Sentara Surgery Specialists, discusses her area of focus, approach to patient care, and what's new and upcoming in Thoracic surgery.
My name is Bethany Tan. I am a general thoracic surgeon, and I work at centrally and with Sentara surgery specialists at Lee. I work in both benign on malignant disease within General Thor ASIC surgery. So, for example, we work with a lot of lung cancers, esophageal cancers, other media, spinal tumors as well as, Ah, lot of benign disease as well of the lung, the chest cavity, space on dove, the esophagus such as high it'll hernias. I think our group has a long tradition of excellent care to the patients, focusing on sort of a 3 60 approach, so treating each patient as an individual and what their specific needs are while providing state of the art care to those individuals. As a teenager, I really enjoyed biology. I don't know if this is terribly original, but I really enjoyed biology. That was my my favorite subject. My mom, uh, saw an article in the Reader's Digest about a plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgery, and she thought I might enjoy that since I enjoyed working my hands and crafts. So I explored that, uh, followed a plastic surgeon found that wasn't quite right for me, but I did love surgery. So I went to medical school, and, uh and then I thought it was gonna be a general surgeon. And then I worked with some general thoracic surgeons and became fascinated with the anatomy and physiology and pathology of the chest cavity. I decided that was worth the further training and went on and did cardiothoracic surgery. Well, I actually went to medical school at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and I did my general surgery training here with Dr L. D Britt and I got spoiled. I thought most areas were like this. I kind of took it for granted. I went away and did a year of general thoracic, um, fellowship at the University of Michigan, which was was wonderful. And then I did two years of cardiothoracic at George Washington. Then I joined the practice, um, in, uh, in Washington, D. C. And it was very good training. Um, I really enjoyed my work, but I found that the people and the area and the practice, um, here, Sentara was was not available elsewhere. And so I really missed it. And so ultimately my husband and I decided to move back. And we've been very happy with that decision. There's a lot of exciting, um, work going on right now in all of cancer, specifically in in my field, in lung cancer and also, uh, spreading over into Asafa Jill cancer. Some of these checkpoint inhibitors, like Keytruda, for example, people familiar with are really providing ah lot of benefits. They're doing a lot of exciting clinical trials, applying it to more and more different tumors. And for the first time in many, many years, we're really seeing the long term survival of people with lung cancer really extending. Even Those who have distant disease are now able to have prolonged lives with good quality of life with some of these new medications. So it's pretty exciting. New medications come out all the time. Um, it's very different than it was 10 years ago when we didn't have very many new things. Thio offer patients
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