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Learning The Basics
The importance of creating a multidisciplinary team to support your
treatment course is vital. At some treatment centers, multi-modality clinics
exist where you will find all of these support individuals under one roof, but
in many cases you will have to compile your own team from the available
resources in your town or treatment network. Try to find physicians and
support individuals who can work well together, especially with regard to
reading test results and communicating with ease over the variables of your
diagnosis.
When Should You Work With An Oncologist?
Oncologists are cancer specialists who treat cancer with chemotherapy or
other systemic therapies, such as immunotherapy, vaccines, and biological
drugs. That is why for cancers that require additional treatment modalities,
such as surgery or radiation (i.e. breast cancer, colon cancer, or lung
cancer), you always need to see a surgeon and a radiation specialist, in
addition to the oncologist.
Cutaneous lymphomas are approached in a slightly different way. Since the
treatment for cutaneous lymphoma may consist of skin-directed therapies
(usually administered by dermatologists) or systemic therapies (usually
administered by oncologists), depending on the stage, a step approach has
often been adopted.
Early stages have typically been treated with skin-directed therapy by
dermatologists, with little oncology input, and advanced stages have
typically been treated with systemic therapy by oncologists, with little
dermatology input. While this system may superficially appear to be simple
and economical in terms of time management, visits, tests, and payments,
and has produced acceptable outcomes in many cases, it has the big
disadvantage that patients are often lost in the critical transition from one
type of therapy to the other.
Furthermore, adequate pre-planning for systemic therapy in a patient
beginning to display resistance to skin-directed therapy cannot be
accomplished even by most dermatologists. Likewise, optimal skin care,
which remains an essential component of each patient’s treatment plan,
even in advanced stages, is rarely provided by the oncologist alone. This
fact results in one of two frequently observed outcomes: 1) the patient
has to keep shuttling back and forth between the dermatologist’s and the
oncologist’s office, often with poor or no communication, which defies the
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