People with incurable cancer need doctors who offer them hope but also give them a clear idea of what is realistically possible. Doctors can find it hard to be both empathic and honest when the [more]
Complex healthcare cannot succeed without effective communication between everyone involved in the patient’s care, with each understanding and respecting the contribution of others. Peter McIntyre looks at where things can go wrong, and how to [more]
Cancer, genetics, “bad luck” and prevention through lifestyle: two years after their first study that tried to quantify the random mutations that accumulate during stem cell divisions in healthy cells and drive cancer in different [more]
Mr Lloyd is angry! His elderly mother is getting no treatment for her metastatic lung cancer, and he doesn’t want to hear what the doctors and nurses are saying… …A different approach by a new [more]
Sustaining a good quality of life becomes harder as cancers progress. Advocates are saying their needs have gone unmet for too long, and are working with professionals to define what they need and how best [more]
If Tomasetti and Vogelstein had not used the words bad luck in their paper on how variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions, the media might [more]
A course teaching leadership skills to cancer clinicians is proving a hit among the growing number of oncologists now finding themselves being asked to take on management roles. According to a 2012 report from Leeds [more]
The complexity of cancer, the risks and benefits associated with alternative treatment options, the care needs of patients, all point to the need for input from specialists in many disciplines. But are regular face-to-face multidisciplinary [more]
Two practitioners of integrative oncology make the case for using non-traditional therapies alongside mainstream care and for abandoning the term complementary and alternative medicine as unhelpful and misleading in this comprehensive article, which [more]
Online communities can help patients learn about and weigh up the options open to them. Where enough patients are involved, they are also helping to shape those options, opening up new opportunities for accelerating research [more]
Every patient wants to be cured. But a culture that defines success as cure’ condemns many patients and doctors to failure. What does treatment ‘success’ mean in cancer? Does it only mean curing the cancer? [more]
Journalists who write about their own cancer journeys are able to convey important insights in a language that people understand and are eager to read It is not surprising that a lot of journalists [more]