How do oncologist know if chemo is working?
The best way to tell if chemotherapy is working for your cancer is through follow-up testing with your doctor. Throughout your treatment, an oncologist will conduct regular visits, and blood and imaging tests to detect cancer cells and whether they’ve grown or shrunk.
What are the most toxic chemo drugs?
Doxorubicin, an old chemotherapy drug that carries this unusual moniker because of its distinctive hue and fearsome toxicity, remains a key treatment for many cancer patients.
Why do oncologists push chemo?
An oncologist may recommend chemotherapy before and/or after another treatment. For example, in a patient with breast cancer, chemotherapy may be used before surgery, to try to shrink the tumor. The same patient may benefit from chemotherapy after surgery to try to destroy remaining cancer cells.
What happens if you choose not to do chemo?
If you decide to stop chemotherapy, be sure you’re still getting relief from symptoms such as pain, constipation, and nausea. This is called palliative care, and it’s meant to improve your quality of life. Medications and other treatments, such as radiation, are part of palliative care.
Do patients really want to know the truth?
Contrary to what many physicians have thought in the past, a number of studies have demonstrated that patients do want their physicians to tell them the truth about diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. For instance, 90\% of patients surveyed said they would want to be told of a diagnosis of cancer or Alzheimer’s disease.
What are the signs that chemo is not working?
Signs that a person’s cancer is not responding to chemotherapy include: a tumor growing or not shrinking. cancer spreading to other areas of the body, a process called metastasis. cancer symptoms returning.
What is the hardest chemo drug?
Doxorubicin (Adriamycin) is one of the most powerful chemotherapy drugs ever invented. It can kill cancer cells at every point in their life cycle, and it’s used to treat a wide variety of cancers. Unfortunately, the drug can also damage heart cells, so a patient can’t take it indefinitely.
What is aggressive chemo?
Aggressive care includes chemotherapy after multiple earlier rounds of treatment have stopped working and being admitted to an intensive care unit. Such interventions at the end of life “are widely recognized to be harmful,” Chen said.
What if oncologists didn’t have chemotherapy?
In a way, oncologists are placed in a situation where the sale of chemotherapy and other cancer drugs is their livelihood. Most of the skillset they worked to achieve in their career would be rendered useless if they didn’t have chemotherapy to sell as treatment to their patients.
Is it “up to you” if your oncologist says “no”?
But doctors only offer you choices when it doesn’t actually matter. So when your oncologist says it’s “up to you” whether or not to undergo more treatment for cancer, say no. Just go out and do whatever you want for the rest of your life, however long or short it may be.
Do oncologists fall short in treating cancer patients?
There comes a time, usually after several recurrences of a cancer, when it becomes more rather than less clear that more treatment is not going to help (by which I mean “meaningfully prolong the patient’s life”). This is the key point in the doctor-patient relationship where too many oncologists fall short.
Can cancer cells come back after chemotherapy?
For some, chemotherapy treatments may not kill the cancer cells, or the cells may return after a remission. When cancer reaches this stage, it’s usually called advanced or terminal.