MRF Blog: Treatment
Showing 1 to 5 of 11 in order of most recently published.
March 9, 2012 | Comments (9)
The online community for melanoma patients has been abuzz today about a report by Brian Williams on a patient who had a remarkable experience with melanoma.
She was being treated with Yervoy, one of the two new drugs approved last year for metastatic disease, but was not responding well. Her multiple tumors were growing and a particularly large one was pressing against her spine, causing severe pain.
Doctors decided to use radiation to shrink that one tumor in order to ease the pain. As expected, the large tumor shrank in response to the treatment. Rather unexpectedly...
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January 9, 2012 | Comments (1)
I have been around hospitals, doctors, and life-threatening illnesses for a large portion of my life, so I was recently taken aback to learn that something I had heard said over and over in those settings might actually be insulting.
People respond to serious illness in different ways. Some people dive deep into the internet or library and read everything they can. Others turn to family, or to a series of second opinions. Some simply put their trust in their doctor and say, “You know what is best, just tell me what to do.”
With melanoma, though, treatment...
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November 22, 2011 | Comments ()
His wife died of melanoma a few months ago and he was talking about hope.
I can’t claim to have known her well, but in my own encounters with her and by all accounts, she was a remarkable human being. She was highly respected at work, a close friend to many, a loving wife and a doting mother of two young children.
When she was diagnosed several years ago, the picture was not pretty. The average patient with Stage IV melanoma lives a few months—most often less than a year. But she defied the odds. The standard treatments bought her some time. ...
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October 7, 2011 | Comments (1)
The call came, as they often do, at night. This time it was a mother who has a teenage daughter battling melanoma. The family had seen three or four different doctors, each of whom gave different advice on what treatment to pursue. Now it was decision time, and they had to listen to one person’s advice and ignore that of three other people. What to do?
Melanoma patients have struggled with this for years. When melanoma is caught early, or even if it has spread to the lymph nodes but nowhere else, the best course of action may be to do nothing. ...
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September 30, 2011 | Comments (3)
When a doctor tells a patient they have cancer, they take great pains to explain the situation. The better docs will use lay-language and talk about treatment plans and next steps. More often than not, however, it is a wasted conversation. A patient hears “you have cancer” then everything else is a blur. The physician might as well be reciting a Shakespearean sonnet in Swahili for all the good it does.
And not all of the doctors are that careful. I recall a patient whose doctor went into a long conversation about tests, approaches, strategies....
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