Marybeth S. Hughes, M.D., Surgical Oncology at EVMS, discusses her area of focus, approach to patient care, and what's new and developing in Surgical Oncology.
I'm Dr Mary Beth Hughes. I want a surgical oncologist with Eastern Virginia Medical School. And I do all my, uh, complex operations over at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. So my academic clinical interests are in melanoma and, uh, neuroendocrine cancers. Those have been the primary interests from an academic standpoint, but we do do general surgical oncology, which essentially that means we've all done a 2 to 3 year fellowship beyond general surgery in cancer. So that compatibility very melanoma, breast cancer. It includes all the inter abdominal cancers, gastric pancreas, liver. I grew up with math schoolteacher parents. Uh, my dad was born legally blind, and when I was a young girl, I was probably 13. My sister was 11. My my dad could never tell us apart unless we spoke. And then he got a corneal transplant and then could see the next day. And so that transformation was remarkable. I thought if I could change somebody's life one day even remotely close to that, that would be worth a life worth living That brought me and my sister were both physicians, you know, patient care, I think, is the most important thing that we do as physicians, and I think it's our job to be the patient advocate. I think you need to treat your patients like there are somebody that's from your family. I think that if you treat people that way, then you will never go wrong. And so that's pretty much the way I treat my patients. I'm very, um, protective of them. I'm their advocate. I only want to do what's right for them, and what I recommend for them is no different than I would recommend for my family. So there's a lot of very exciting things going on in research surrounding cancer. So there's multiple topics, like immunotherapy, so using the body's immune system to fight cancer. And I did a lot of research on that in my previous job at the National Cancer Institute up at NIH. So I've done a lot of, uh, harnessing the immune system to help fight cancer and to make it a treatable disease. Mostly, we're more interested in cures, and we've actually seen in previous cancers that have never been cured. They can be cured with immunotherapy, so it is remarkable and exciting. There's also a lot going on around genomics, meaning the makeup of the cancers and what genes are activated or inactivated. And how can we take advantage of those and get the upper hand for cancers that aren't as responsive to the immune system? I actually trained here in surgery. I was a medical student at Eastern Virginia Medical School. I did my general surgery training residency here, went away for 14 years and then recently come back home, so to speak. So we have family in the area, and this is really where we wanted the kids to finish growing up.
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