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Video transcript
In medical school, I was exposed to cancer patients, and I found that I really thoroughly enjoyed the relationships I was able to build with those patients.
My name is Dr. Joe Mendez, I am a neuro-oncologist here at Huntsman Cancer Institute. And I also do some teaching in the school of medicine as well.
What type of cancer do you treat?
So, I treat brain tumors. The technical term is a neuro-oncologist, and my role specifically is to help patients in their journey through brain cancer.
What drew you to your specialty?
I think for me, it was fascinating to learn about the brain, but more in particular, I view the brain as really the organ that really makes life worth living, so to speak. So, it's why we have any emotion, whether it's love, sadness, whatever it may be, but for me, those all signify really the importance and why people want to live, so to speak, and the value of living.
And then, in addition, in medical school, I was exposed to cancer patients. And I found that I really, thoroughly enjoyed the relationships I was able to build with those patients.
I think for me, there was a lot of privilege, I felt and getting to be a part of their journey and getting to know their story and history.
Is it true that you spent time as an engineer before medical school?
I'd always known I wanted to be a physician. But while I was an undergrad, I really became interested in engineering. And really, that came through an organization called Engineers without Borders. That organization really focused on, I would say, a public health outlook to addressing individual鈥檚 challenges, particularly along the lines of purified water. For me, it was still a continuous theme. The theme being public health is medicine, but just on a larger scale to some degree. But I still very much wanted to pursue medicine and have more of a personalized care for patients.
Why is brain cancer difficult to treat?
I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, so why is it difficult to treat brain cancer? The brain has this beautiful thing called the blood-brain barrier. It's basically a filter or a sieve, that basically doesn't allow pretty much anything that we get exposed to, to enter the brain. And from an evolutionary perspective, that's really important, because it helps us eliminate, for example, infections in the brain. The risk of those are low. Unfortunately, that blood-brain barrier is a big challenge to getting into, meaning drugs getting into the brain and actually treating those tumors.
In addition to that, I would say that the biology is different in the brain in the sense that the immune system is thought to behave very, very differently than other parts of the body. It's thought to be an immune privileged portion of the body and in that regard, it can make the innate applications, or the innate parts of our immune system that help us fight cancer, more difficult.
What鈥檚 unique about patient care at Huntsman Cancer Institute?
Patient care here at Huntsman Cancer Institute, when I think about this question, it really pulls me back to why I chose to come and practice at Huntsman Cancer Institute. The key thing for me is just the well-roundedness of the care, the amount of support that is available here.
When I think of it from a practical perspective, as a physician, my mind goes directly to the amount of support to help me care for patients so, nurses dedicated to my team, physician assistants dedicated to my team, clinical pharmacists dedicated to my team that actively work with me in clinic to help take care of patients, a social worker dedicated to my team to help me support patients with all of the additional things that patients are dealing with beyond just the cancer itself.
So, all of those are really kind of in my opinion, really, why it's so amazing to get care here at Huntsman Cancer Institute.
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