photograph by karen pulfer focht
Editor’s Note: Every year, the national medical group Castle Connolly compiles a list of the best doctors in America. In the Memphis area, the 2024 Top Doctors list comprises more than 400 physicians representing 60 specialties. Here, we introduce you to one of the caregivers who have been a Top Doc time and again. For a complete list, pick up a copy of our June 2024 issue from your favorite newsstand, or — even better — subscribe.
A eureka moment about her career choice never came to Dr. Sonia Benn. She had no tragic or comedic anecdote to include on her med school applications, no medical doctors in her immediate family to look up to for inspiration. She was just meant to be a physician, and she always knew it. But she didn’t know — at least until her final years of schooling at University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Medicine — that she would specialize in oncology and hematology.
“I never thought about oncology,” Benn admits, “even when I was doing [my oncology and hematology rotation].” Yet when her rotation leader, Dr. Mohammad Jahanzeb, suggested she pursue the specialty, something pulled at her, almost like a sign. Today, Benn practices at West Cancer Center & Research Institute’s clinic in Desoto County.
“Even when times get hard, and even when you’re dealing constantly with dying and death,” she says, “this is what I’m supposed to do. I feel it to my core.”
Oncology, Benn says, is a constantly evolving field. “When I first started, I did everything,” she says. “I saw colon cancer, I saw lung cancer, I saw malignant hematology. Now, I do primarily breast cancer, and even within breast cancer, you have to keep up because things are constantly changing. New therapies are being developed. When I have metastatic breast cancer patients, you could be sitting next to one, and not even know it because she’s six years into her disease and she has no evidence of disease. I have her on two pills and she’s doing fine.”
Clinical advances aren’t the only changes Benn has seen in the way she practices medicine. “Somewhere between 2012 and 2015, Memphis was number-one in terms of disparity for breast cancer mortality: Black women were more likely to die from breast cancer, stage for stage, than their white counterparts.”
That’s no longer the case, she says. “Thank God, we’ve changed that, but it was important to me to help impact that in any little way. Like, what are the simple things that I can do to change that pendulum? Being one of the breast cancer docs, I go to the churches and tell them to have their mammograms every year. You have to understand your community and just get in there and help them out.”
Even in her own practice, Benn focuses on education. “It’s so important that you understand your disease,” Benn says. “We keep it simple. My parents were both professors, and it was so important to them that their students understood [what they were being taught], and I saw their passion. Then, coming from an African-American standpoint, I think there are a lot of times, as a culture, we feel as though it’s not necessarily explained, and so I think I’m able to reach my African-American patients also because I know how they feel. I try to make sure that I meet them wherever they are. I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re a minority; I’m going to come in here and explain this to you like anybody else.”
After all, Benn often meets her patients at their lowest moments — when they are in shock, barely able to grasp their diagnosis.
“Those are the moments that are most memorable to me,” she says. “Because I put myself in their shoes, and I’m like, can I do that? My patients are a blessing to me. They’re the champions.”
