By Jim Servin
When Chloe Harrouche was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 23, her reaction was shock and disbelief. The New York City native, who had graduated from UPenn as a bioengineer, considered herself well versed in health care, having worked in the medical field as a consultant. “At first I questioned if it was really happening,” Harrouche recalls. “Did they make a mistake? Even when they told me that the biopsy showed cancer cells, I thought it was a precursor to cancer, that I was going to get it removed and that would be the end of it. But it was Stage 2.”
Her response, swift and decisive—a double mastectomy two weeks after the diagnosis—was followed by chemotherapy and radiation. By December of that year, she was deemed cancer-free, but filled with questions about prevention and where that fit into her care going forward. “I saw for the first time how discombobulated the patient experience is. You’re seeing all these incredible specialists, but none of them are talking to each other,” Harrouche says. “There’s no coordination of care, or joint effort toward prevention.”
Harrouche created a wellness regimen that consisted of strenuous exercise, a low-carbohydrate diet with caloric restriction, and intermittent fasting. But she admits she went too far, impacting her ovarian health at a time when she was ready to start a family. “That’s when I learned about the power of integrative medicine,” Harrouche says. “For the first time, I met with a doctor who was able to identify that my body was in a state of stress, and not in an optimal state of being able to conceive. That taught me a lot about the risks of wellness. Wellness is something that most people aspire to care about. The problem comes when you have too much consumerization of wellness and too little clinical oversight.”
