The Breast Advice Everyone Needs to Hear Right Now — with Dr. Elisa Port
This week on Lipstick on the Rim...
She’s back—and this time, she brought a book. Dr. Elisa Port, Chief of Breast Surgery at Mount Sinai, returns to Lipstick on the Rim to talk about her new book, The Breast Advice. With 25 years of experience and celebrity patients including Chris Evert, Jill Martin, and Rita Wilson, she’s putting everything she knows into one place so women don’t have to sort through the noise alone. We get into personal risk, dense breasts, BRCA testing, mammogram guidelines, and what actually happens after a diagnosis—including why more options doesn’t mean more treatment. This one is for everyone avoiding the topic or already deep in it.
09:35 - Dr. Port on the Breast Cancer Stat That Will Surprise You
“About 90% of women who get breast cancer have no antecedent family history — I think that’s pretty shocking. So we’re all at risk to some degree, at about a 10 to 12% level. That’s the average woman’s risk of getting breast cancer. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are found to have a genetic predisposition, your risk is 60 to 80%. But there’s this whole sliding scale in between, and most women are not at the scary end of it.”
15:22 - Dr. Port on What That 'Increased Risk' From Alcohol Actually Means
“If your overall risk is 10% and you’re increasing it by 10%, that does not mean your risk goes to 20%. It means 10% of that baseline 10% risk — which is 1%. So what if I said to you: your risk of getting breast cancer instead of 10% is now 11%? A lot of women would say, okay, I can live with that for this part of my life that’s very pleasurable. The press plays fast and loose with these numbers because it gets really big headlines — and it scares women unnecessarily.”
25:30 - Dr. Port on Why Her Job Is to Inform, Not Decide
“I’m the expert in cancer. You’re the expert in you. My job is to give really accurate information — strip away the misinformation and strip away all the fictions about what does and does not increase risk. Get the right information and then make a decision for yourself. Don’t tell women there’s no risk, and don’t blow smoke. Women are really sophisticated and they’re smart, and they can make decisions about themselves. That’s the empowerment.”
