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Dr. Susan Love
Susan Love's Presentation to Santa Barbara Council for Self-Esteem
SBCC Adult Education - 10/15/04

Dr. Susan Love is the founder and driving force in the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation located in Pacific Palisades, California.Dr. Love is also one of the founders and a board member of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and was appointed by President Clinton to the National Cancer Advisory Board. She is a Clinical Professor of Surgery at UCLA and the Medical Director of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the eradication of breast cancer. She is the author of Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book and Dr. Susan Love’s Hormone Book. Dr. Love lives in Pacific Palisades with her partner, Helen, their daughter, one dog and two cats. Dr. Love shared her personal experiences regarding the development of her own self-esteem with a large, enthusiastic audience at Santa Barbara Community College’s Schott Center on October 15, 2004.

Dr. Love indicated that she had been an outsider much of her life. Her feelings in this regard began when she moved to Puerto Rico as a young girl in the 1960's. She was an English speaking student surrounded by students who only spoke Spanish. Impressed with the Catholic nuns running her school she entered the convent only to experience her “first failure” to accomplish something she set out to do, when she left the convent after only eight months. In dealing with this she concluded that you must define yourself and not let others do it for you.

Later, a top student, she was turned down by NYU and other medical schools that had only a 5% quota for women. She ended up attending a more diverse SUNY campus in Brooklyn that had a 10% quota. As a woman in a “man’s profession” she reported that she was not treated all that well and once again became an “outsider”. She liked surgery because it allowed her to “fix” people rather than just ‘treat” them, but was told at the end of her training not to bother to apply for residency because she was a woman. So she went to Harvard and the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. She always ended up at or near the top of her class, but found jobs for a woman surgeon hard to come by after graduation. So she ended up in private practice, where she found that she was having breast cancer patients referred rather than male hernia patients and she ended up getting significant experience in breast cancer surgery. She attracted new patients by treating them as human beings, explaining their alternatives to them. At the time her colleagues tended to pat women patients on the head and do what they thought was best.

At about this time she and a friend, who was also a doctor, decided it was time to get married and they both placed ads in the personals’ column of a Boston newspaper. One man answered her ad. Her friend ended up answering the same man’s ad. In the process that ensued she found that she ended up liking her friend better than the gentleman and she and her partner established a relationship that has grown over the past twenty two years. At this point as a woman/surgeon/lesbian she saw little likelihood of joining the Harvard “old boy’s club”, a concept which she found oddly liberating. She and her partner Helen were “outed” by the Boston Globe but her practice continued to thrive. She found herself free to say what she really thought with the view that she had little to lose and that things could only get better.

She wrote a book about breast cancer by compiling the available information about how the breast cancer worked and what the alternatives were. She got lots of flak for disclosing the medical establishment’s well-kept “secrets”, but her book is now in its 4 th edition and is considered the “bible” regarding breast cancer.

She then wrote a book about Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) questioning its use without first developing the data to prove it safe. Again the medical establishment reacted harshly as did the pharmaceutical companies. The New Yorker ran an article with a front page headline “How Wrong is Susan Love?” She concluded from all this that there is nothing better for one’s self esteem than to be right. She found or reported HRT links to increased incidents of heart disease, stroke and dementia. She found that although the data and information changed over the years, many doctors were afraid to admit that they had done the best they could with the information that they had, but that they now had new information which would suggest a new and different approach.

She was recruited to UCLA in 1992, but after a few years found that she and others were still doing the same things they had been doing for the past 20 years: Surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Mainstream medicine was working on making better mammogram machines, or improving radiation techniques or developing new toxic cocktails. She wanted to prevent breast cancer and decided to go into research to get rid of the disease. Getting grants for new, innovative research initiatives proved difficult, but once again she was on the edge, on the outside, looking in; a place she was accustomed to and in which she could thrive. Again she found both her self-esteem and her projects were validated because she was not seeking instant approval by others.

She talked about her 16 year old daughter Katie. Susan is Katie’s natural birth mother. The father was a cousin of her partner Helen, which provided them with both family’s DNA. Katie was legally adopted by both of them, who were also married for six months before a court ruling annulled the marriage. Susan talked of the prejudice with which the straight children of gay parents must deal.

She presented the analogy of being told you had one car that you were given at an early age; a car that had to be your one and only car through high school, college, the work years and finally to drive you to the retirement home. How would you treat it? She suggested that our bodies were something we didn’t choose, but were given and that the best approach was to treat them well and with respect. Get comfortable with who you are; that she said is the basis for good self-esteem.

She believes in meditation and fitness. She runs marathons and is now learning how to play the piano. She says the mental exercise makes it easier to find her keys, both her car keys AND the piano keys.

Dr. Love then spent over forty minutes answering an array of questions from the mostly female audience about breast cancer research and hormone replacement therapy. When last seen after the meeting was over, she was surrounded by another thirty women for who she was answering questions individually. She might still be there, always listening, always the educator. She is a woman with incredibly high goals who just won’t take no for an answer.

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