Dr. Kameelah Phillips Is a Women’s Health Advocate and Breast Cancer Awareness Champion

The New York City-based OB/GYN shares the importance of breast cancer screenings, her hopes for the future of minority women’s healthcare and more.

Dr. Kameelah Phillips / Courtesy of Dr. Kameelah Phillips

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, one in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetimes. Aside from skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common skin cancer among women. For more information and ways to support, click here.

Dr. Kameelah Phillips is a health expert who knows how to pivot. The board certified New York City-based OB/GYN is the founder of Calla Women’s Health, a practice she launched in 2020 after being laid off from a multi-speciality group that decided to no longer provide women’s health services.

The day Dr. Phillips opened her doors for business was the same day that Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down the city due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The unfortunate timing forced Dr. Phillips to pivot to telehealth visits rather than in-person ones, but she was able to provide the same standard of care regardless. She holds a degree in human biology with an emphasis in women’s health and human sexuality from Stanford University and attended the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Dr. Phillips specializes in sexual medicine and menopause, and is a lifelong women’s health advocate.

“I was primarily raised by women, and I learned really early on that, for example, if my grandmother wasn’t feeling well or my mom had terrible periods or my aunt was dealing with pain or whatever issues, then basically the whole familial ecosystem fell apart,” Dr. Phillips says. “Really everything flowed through the women of the house. And so I felt like I could take care of family, actually on a broader scale, just by taking care of the women, because when the women were healthy, people ate nutritious meals and got to school and went outside and were able to thrive.”

We recently sat down with Dr. Phillips to learn more about her POV on how breast cancer awareness has shifted over the years, her hopes for the future of minority women’s healthcare, the importance of finding an OB/GYN you can trust and more.

Know your family history, but get screened for breast cancer regardless

While Dr. Phillips believes the medical community has done a great job of raising breast cancer awareness in recent years, she also finds herself frustrated that many women still don’t understand that annual mammograms are an absolute must, regardless of family history.

“I think we’ve done, really, in medicine, an excellent job of talking about BRCA patients, making people aware that, you know, some people are significantly higher risk, but I think that also, on the flip side, because we focus so much on these people who are higher risk ... people have forgotten that the majority of breast cancer comes from people that don’t have a family history.”

Though family history is a major risk factor for breast cancer, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) estimates that merely 5% to 10% of breast cancer cases are associated with a family history of the disease. Regardless of genetics, the American Cancer Society encourages women aged 40 and up in the U.S. to get a mammogram annually, while you can also perform regular breast self-exams at home.

Even if you don’t have a family history of breast cancer, lifestyle and demographic factors can increase your likelihood of developing the disease. For example, Black women tend to be diagnosed with breast cancer at a younger age and at a more advanced stage than their white counterparts, and are more likely to die from the disease.

“So many of us have just no idea of what our genetic history is, so making the commitment to talk to people, especially family members about health, [is incredibly important],” Dr. Phillips notes. “I think it is also a public health opportunity to educate women of color that breast cancer is actually not a death sentence. The survival rates can be particularly high if we catch it earlier, and this is even more important for Black women, who tend to have more aggressive subtypes of breast cancer.”

In the future, Dr. Phillips also hopes to see more Black and Brown women involved in medical trials. Since no two cancers are the same, these learnings will help doctors understand how to best treat different subtypes of breast cancer.

Find a physician whom you’re comfortable with

At the end of the day, Dr. Phillips stresses the importance of finding a healthcare provider whom you feel comfortable opening up to about any health-related concerns. While you’ve likely heard about self-advocacy at the doctor’s office, Dr. Phillips strongly believes it is the physician’s job to make a patient feel seen and heard from the start.

“I feel like physicians really have the responsibility to listen to patients and engage them in the conversation about what bothers them,” she says. “ ... In a doctor’s office, it’s such a vulnerable situation that you shouldn’t have to fight for [getting breast] imaging or for your concerns. And so if that happens, I always tell people, [try to] find another doctor that you have a better communication style with.”