Tailoring Treatment

Videos — July 1, 2016

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What you're asking is how can we improve the care of patients with blood cancers. What we have seen and in this meeting, lots of new drugs have come about. The responses are improving, patients are getting cured, they live longer. That's one aspect, which is what the physicians would do and physicians would take care of.

As we improve upon this, we have a lot of other areas to cover to make patients happier, better, healthier. One of the biggest problems with more new drugs is that, we have confusion in mind of patient. "Which treatment should I get?" We, as the physicians, are obliged to give them choices.

They're not equipped to make choice. They do not know the side effects as well. They can go to Internet and find, but Internet gives you very skewed, sometimes not totally accurate results. We need to have means to educate them. That's the most important component to start with. We have to educate the caregivers, those who are taking care of them.

What should they do? How should they take care of patient? What do they expect? That's a first aspect of it.

The second component is quality of care of the patient. As they live longer, they need to live better. They need to live healthier. They need to have full life. It's possible now. In the old days when we had only few drugs, we couldn't afford to do it.

We just had to make them live. They're going to live longer. We can afford to see how they live better. There're multiple components of this. We have to look after their nutrition. We have to think about their physical capability, physical therapy. We have to look at their mental. They are depressed. How can we help them? Are they can overcome various other things? We have to look about their occupation? Can they do the same work? How can they do better?

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