Staging
A patient generally first goes through a staging process to see if s/he can benefit from local treatment. Staging makes use of clinical, imaging and pathological assessment to make a best guess by the physician. If the cancer has spread beyond the breast and the lymph nodes then it is classified as Stage 4 or metastatic cancer and requires mostly systemic treatment.
Medical specialty professional organizations recommend against a physician's use of PET scans, CT scans, or bone scans when staging early breast cancer with low risk for metastasis. The rationale is that there is no evidence which shows that extra testing results in better outcomes for a patient, but a patient who does receive tests against the consensus of professionals in the field is more likely to receive invasive procedures, overutilization of medical services, unnecessary radiation exposure, and experience misdiagnosis.
Read more about this topic: Breast Cancer Treatment
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