The colorectal surgery team at UVA, including two board-certified colon and rectal surgeons, Charles Friel, MD, and Tracy Hedrick, MD, offers comprehensive surgical care for diseases of the anus, colon and rectum, including cancer.
Well, colorectal cancer is a common problem. It affects one in 20 people. And it continues to be the second most common cause of cancer death in the United States.
It requires radiation. It requires medical oncology. And it requires a surgeon who has an expertise and an understanding of the principles of something we call the total mesorectal excision. So having a surgeon who does this quite a lot is really critically important.
People are very concerned about the implications of that treatment and, in particular, the need for colostomy bags. And so one of the things that we work with, and we work very hard for people, is try to cure the mother cancer but also try to avoid doing a colostomy if at all possible.
At age 50, everybody is at risk to develop colon and rectal cancer. It's critically important, therefore, that we all have screening for colon cancer. That comes in a multitude of different tests. I think the most common tests, by far, is colonoscopy.
We also can discover polyps during a colonoscopy. Polyps are considered to be premalignant lesions. These are lesions that can grow up to be cancers. With the help of the colonoscopy and the experts that run them, they can identify these polyps, and they can remove them.
Some patients, however, don't really need a big operation. And they can have an even more minimally invasive operation. All operations, our goals is really the same. It is to try to get the tumor out. It's to try to get it out in a safe way. And it's try to get it out in a way that it's never going to come back.
