Mayo Clinic is a fantastic place to have multidisciplinary care for highly complex patients.

The brain tumor program here is flourished with people who really care about what they do.

I often get phone calls from referring physicians who have somebody in the office with a, a newly diagnosed brain tumor.

And one of the things that I try to communicate is that this is a team and, uh, we're all on the same team.

The goal here is to help the patient and at Mayo the needs of the patient come first.

And sometimes these are patients that family physicians have known for years or decades, and we really honor and respect that.

And we want to be able to help these patients, in the best way that we possibly can. Working together as a team, one of the things that we do here is make sure that we can see people almost right away.

We have a policy that we'll see anybody with a brain tumor within 48 hours if they want to be seen that quickly.

Time is critical, for the management of patients with brain cancers.

Our practices are such that, you know, we find it really easy to contact our neurosurgeons or radiation oncologists and get insights into the care of the patient immediately so that we can handle patient care at that moment.

One of the things that we've been also thinking about is the time the patients spend here at the clinic and what's the financial toxicities to them and what does it mean to their life.

And as much as I love, Rochester Minnesota, where I work, it's not everybody's home. And so being at home is really important.

It's important for people's health and their mental wellbeing for everything.

And so we want to be able to, to work with patients, their caregivers at home, their local providers, to make sure that, that they are able to do that as much as possible.

A lot of our approaches is also exploring shorter courses of radiation and targeted better with our new diagnostic technologies that we have in a few years, we're gonna have access to carbon therapy.

It's gonna have a fantastic ability to treat the really tough cancers that are otherwise not successfully treated with proton therapy or x-rays.

We also have one of the largest, if not the largest group of MRI magnets at 3 Tesla, which is kind of the higher standard clinical grade.

We also had the first 7 Tesla magnet, the strongest magnet approved for clinical use in brain imaging that was first developed and put into use clinically here at Mayo Clinic.

And so that just gives us a, an added degree of information, uh, that we wouldn't have otherwise.

Our nuclear medicine department here is spectacular and have led the way with a number of novel PET scans for metabolic imaging, which we have used at least experimentally to guide surgery, to guide radiation treatments for, for brain tumors with excellent outcomes.

But the goal is not technology for technology's sake.

The goal here is to help people do well and get home and resume their regular lives. We are always pushing the boundaries for new treatments.

I tell patients we're better at treating brain tumors now than we were a year ago or five years ago, and we're gonna be better a year from now, or five years from now. So that depth of expertise really makes a difference.

There are not many other places in the world that have the same degree of experiences as we have, and that matters for the outcomes for patients.