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Two of the region’s leading cancer organizations—Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center and Ochsner Cancer Center—are pushing deeper into underserved communities, deploying new technology and rethinking how care is delivered. The challenges of access, staffing and financing remain formidable, but the distance between patients and quality care is shrinking.
Nearly 80% of Louisiana’s land is classified as rural, and for many residents in those communities, a cancer diagnosis has historically carried an added burden: The nearest high-quality treatment center is hours away. The Capital Region, shaped by pockets of poverty, high rates of modifiable risk factors and long-standing gaps in access to specialist care, sits at the center of this challenge.
Dr. Burke J. Brooks, medical oncologist at Ochsner Cancer Center in Baton Rouge, has been practicing in the region for nearly four decades. He is direct about the underlying dynamics.
“We live in an area that is a relatively poor area of the United States,” he says. “And poverty is known to be a major risk factor in developing cancer, mainly because people who have lower economic levels tend to smoke more. And smoking is a major risk factor for cancer. The second most important risk factor for cancer is obesity. So between tobacco use and obesity, that accounts for nearly 50% of all cancer in the United States. And so, we see the effects of that here in the south Louisiana area.”
Brooks is also skeptical of the environmental narrative that has come to define the region’s cancer identity. “A lot of people have talked about `Cancer Alley’ between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. That, in my opinion, has been a pretty well-worn statement and I’m not sure it’s a deserved one. I believe that protecting the environment is absolutely critical, but to directly relate that to someone’s individual cancer is a very large leap. I don’t see clusters of cancers around groups of people directly related to chemical exposure.”
The cancers he sees are more often common than rare, and, as he sees it, often driven by tobacco, diet and unmanaged chronic disease. “The most polluted air in the world is the breath of a smoker,” he says. “I’m not saying pollution shouldn’t be investigated—but we shouldn’t let it become a scapegoat that distracts from modifiable risk factors.”
Read the full story, and check out the full Trends in Health Care package from this month’s Business Report. Send comments to editor@businessreport.com.
