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Associate Professor
UT Health San Antonio
Brian Fricke, MD is the co-director of Cancer Rehabilitation at Mays Cancer Center and the inaugural Hospital Department Chair of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Multispecialty and Research Hospital (MSRH) at UT Health San Antonio in San Antonio, TX. He is also a San Antonio native and UTHSCSA med school graduate who joined the Rehab Medicine Department faculty in 2020 after completing his PM&R residency at Georgetown University/National Rehabiliation Hospital and Cancer Rehabilitation Fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center. His primary clinical activities are at his cancer rehab clinic at Mays Cancer Center where he treats a variety of cancer and treatment-related impairments, such as chemotherapy-induced neuropathy, radiation fibrosis syndrome, and cancer-related lymphedema. His team also manages the Lymphedema Early Evaluation and Detection (LEED) surveillance program in collaboration with Breast Surgical Oncology to proactively monitor patients at high-risk for development of secondary lymphedema. He is also in the process of collaborating with the HEAL lab and Breast Medical Oncology teams to pilot a prehabilitation program with a novel functional impairment triage tool with plans to eventually expand prehabilitation to all cancer subtypes using this model. His other long-term goals for clinical service expansion include launching a consult-based multi-disciplinary inpatient rehabilitation care model at the new MSRH as well as collaborating within the multidisciplinary teams to better define and smooth the transition of patients between inpatient and outpatient settings. His research strategy is predominantly focused on embedding clinically and research-relevant patient reported outcomes (PROs) and functional outcome measures into routine clinical practice that will provide a repository of data that can be retrospectively reviewed as part of any cancer research intervention study.
