Abandonment of Treatment

At a recent meeting I met Michael P. Link, MD, the current President of ASCO (the American Society of Clinical Oncology) and a professor of Pediatric Oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our conversation nurtured my hope.

Dr. Link's animated discussion of progress in anti-cancer therapies didn't surprise me. At national meetings, I'm used to any discussion of more effective and/or safer therapies acting like an "On" switch of oncologists.

What gave me hope was Dr. Link's comments regarding the delivery of medical care in America.

In a recent blog post, Link lamented the poor outlook for children with cancer who live in resource-poor countries throughout the world. "[M]ore than one half of therapeutic failures in these countries are directly attributable to abandonment of therapy—defined as the failure to start or complete curative treatment in the absence of a contraindication to administration of such treatment."

Assuming this likely also applies to adults with cancer, he cites the roles of "poverty, absent infrastructure, and limited access to subspecialty care."

Link urges readers to think about the fact that most of the common childhood cancers can be cured, by "relatively cheap curative therapies [that] are unavailable to the majority of the world's children with cancer."

This compassionate leader in cancer care urges his fellow oncologists to "focus on delivery as well as discovery, so that we can leverage what we know now into better outcomes and quality of life for patients with cancer throughout the world."

Thank you for your leadership, Dr. Link.

Comments

[Jan Hasak]

Thank you for enlightening and reminding your readership about compassion toward those less fortunate. We in America tend to numb ourselves toward others struggling in poverty to make ends meet, let alone pay for cancer treatments.
Jan