PHOTO COURTESY WEST CANCER CENTER
Dr. Sylvia S. Richey, West Cancer Center
Editor's Note: Every year, this magazine presents its list of the Top Doctors in Memphis. The physicians are selected by Castle Connolly, a healthcare research company and the official source for Top Doctors for the past 25 years. Castle Connolly’s established nomination survey, research, screening and selection process, under the direction of an MD, involves thousands of physicians as well as academic medical centers, specialty hospitals, and regional and community hospitals all across the nation. The complete list of more than 250 Top Doctors in Memphis, arranged by 45 specialties, is published in the June/July issue of Memphis magazine.
As a young girl growing up in Birmingham, Dr. Sylvia Richey always knew she wanted to be a doctor. “Ever since I can remember, I was fixing and repairing my dolls,” she says, “and since my mother didn’t like the sight of blood, whenever anyone in the family needed a bandage, I took care of them. It seemed a natural path for me to take.”
A love of art history led her to a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, but she used her elective classes there to prepare her for study at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham. Although she originally planned to specialize in pediatrics, a fellowship in medical oncology brought her to UT-Memphis. After additional training at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, she returned here and joined the staff of West Cancer Center in 2005, where today she also serves as the associate medical director.
“What attracted me to oncology is that you are taking care of the whole patient and not just focusing on one organ,” she says. “To be effective, you have to treat cancer in the context of the rest of the body.”
In the 15 years since she’s been practicing, the most dramatic improvement in cancer treatment has been targeted therapy. “The sophistication of the molecular testing that we can do now really individualizes a patient’s treatment,” says Richey. “That approach didn’t exist years ago, but now it absolutely dictates how we treat every patient we see.” In the past, she explains, “Breast cancer was breast cancer. Now we know that not all breast cancers are the same, and so the treatment options are different for every patient.”
Richey has also witnessed many technological advances in her field, such as improvements in imaging, CT scans, and other diagnostic equipment. “We can find things earlier, which is great,” she says, “and surgeries have become less invasive, which is always better for the patient.”
In 2017, she took on a new role as director of the center’s Integrative Oncology Division, which is designed to address what patients can do for themselves during treatment. She likes this analogy: “If you think of cancer in someone’s body as a weed in their garden, the doctor is focusing on how to get rid of that weed, and we have to decide what weed killer to use,” she says. “But in the bigger picture, the patient has to take care of the whole garden, to make it as inhospitable as possible to that weed, so it won’t come back.”
The program addresses a patient’s spiritual and religious needs, shows them how to handle the psychological stress of a cancer diagnosis, and emphasizes the importance of nutrition, diet, and exercise. A new component is art therapy, where an artist works with patients during their “cancer journey.”
An integrated approach to therapy is key to the future of cancer treatment, says Richey. Also important is what she calls “survivorship” — how to get cancer patients back into society after they have recovered. That wasn’t always a concern years ago. “When I first started practicing,” she says, “our whole patient population would turn over every couple of years because patients were not long-term survivors. But now they are living longer, and I think that’s fantastic.”
