Cancer Survivors Also Live With Distress including commentary (public)

Medscape

"To say that a diagnosis of cancer can be stressful for patients is putting it mildly, and the rigors of treatment often add to the burden. Yet more than half of adult cancer survivors report that they have never used or been offered professional counseling, support groups, or other services to help them cope with psychologic distress.
To assess this aspect of cancer care, Laura P. Forsythe, PhD, from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute in Washington, DC, and colleagues used data on 1777 cancer survivors from the 2010 National Health Interview. The results were published online April 22 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.....



comment

Nurse - Anesthesiology:

 

"Forget about providing psychosocial care. Get the nurses to start acknowledging that patients may have pain and problems outside the expected window for these complaints. I have been told by several oncology nurses that I "shouldn't have pain at the site of my sentinel node dissection two years after the surgery" and yet I have cording and daily pain. And my radiation oncologist tells me I "shouldn't have heat and swelling this long after radiation" but I do. And you think these folks are ready to address my psychosocial needs... They can't even adequately address my physical symptoms in an appropriately compassionate manner. And I'm a nurse practitioner. You'd think they'd be ashamed to show their ignorance to me but no... Imagine if I tried telling one of my seizure patients that they shouldn't be having seizures because I had them on the "right medicine". It would be a disgrace. So let's not get ahead of ourselves. I go to therapy that I arrange for myself, I know I need it and I go and get it. At diagnosis I was offered a fellow cancer patient as my counselor, I declined. And I go to a big urban Cancer Center, that is apparently what they can offer. There is a lot of talk and hot air but so far all I can see is you are made to feel that you had better be grateful you are alive and get on with it. And absolutely no complaining, or deviating from the expected norm. Or else."