Living With Incurable Cancer

Living With Incurable Cancer

Each year, the prognosis of possible life expectancy of cancer patients is increasing. This is true for all types of cancer, even those in later stages, and for patients with incurable cancers. This improvement in life expectancy has been brought by better treatments, including immunotherapies and tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), as well as with an overall better and deeper understanding of patients needs during this stressful time in their lives. In general, this is great news, naturally, but it comes with a whole new set of challenges, for both cancer patients and their doctors. In this article, I would like to talk about some of those challenges.

Incurable Does Not Equal Untreatable

It’s important for cancer patients to keep in mind that the fact that some cancers are incurable does not mean they are also untreatable. In my years of practice, working as an oncologist with cancer patients with various kinds and stages of cancer, I learned the importance of self-care in the process of recovery. The medical community has made heaps of progress in the battle against cancer, concentrating attention on research. But, while we take those steps in science research, we mustn’t lose sight of individual patients, whose type of cancer, being incurable, is maybe less interesting to researchers and their sponsors.

Challenges Of Life With Incurable Cancer

Today, it is entirely not uncommon for cancer patients to live years, hopefully even decades after a cancer diagnosis, or even after their specific cancer has been found to be incurable. The research community has recently started to study and address the psychological, social, spiritual, and financial impact of living for years with incurable cancer. The population of patients with metastatic cancer is rapidly growing- it’s time to more seriously study metastatic cancer survivors and then better educate the medical community about the needs and challenges of these patients.

Defining Control

There is a couple of terms used to describe this prolonged pause in diseases course.

A doctor may use the term controlled if tests or scans show that the cancer is not changing over time. Another way of defining control would be calling the disease stable.

Cancers like this are watched closely to be sure that they don’t start growing. But this constant awareness, periodical tests, prolonged worrying about cancer can have a overwhelming  impact on patients feelings, which can affect their overall state of being.

This is why I always stress the importance of proper self-care when talking to cancer patients in my medical practice. Using Hope & Beauty products, that I’ve selected specifically for cancer patients, can aid patients to feel better about themselves, helping them to cope with the burden of a prolonged disease.

Controlling Cancer

Most chronic cancers cannot be cured, but rather controlled over a span of months, or maybe even years. There’s always a chance that cancer will go into remission. There are different kinds of remission.

One is when a treatment completely kills off all tumor cells that could be measured or seen on a test. It’s called a complete response or complete remission.

Another kind of remission is a partial response or partial remission. It means that the cancer partly responded to treatment, but it’s still present in the body. A partial response is most often defined as at least a 50% reduction in the measurable tumor.

To qualify as either type of remission, the absence of tumor or reduction in the size of the tumor must last for at least one month. Remission does not mean that cancer has definitely been cured.

Some cancers are more likely to recur and go into remission than others. Often, this repeating cycle of growing, shrinking in size, and stabilizing can mean survival for many years during which the cancer can be managed as just another chronic illness. Treatment can be used to control the cancer, help relieve some of the  symptoms, and help cancer patients live longer and with higher quality.

Focuses Of Palliative Care

Here I would like to take a moment to define a term, that still may be new to some patients.

Palliative care focuses on relief of physical and emotional symptoms related to illness. It’s not expected to treat the cancer or other disease. The goal of palliative care is to make patients life the best it can be at any time- before treatment, during treatment or after treatment.

This means that symptoms like nausea, pain, tiredness, are treated and controlled. Palliative care also helps with emotional symptoms such as stress and depression. Sometimes medicines are used, but other types of treatment such as physical therapy and counseling may also be used.

Surviving Metastatic Cancer

People living with metastatic cancer may feel neglected by the medical and cancer research community. Majority rules, that is the general rule, and metastatic cancer survivors are thousands among millions. But, patients with incurable cancer sometimes need some guidance too, to help them with seemingly irrelevant health decisions. This is why I created Hope & Beauty, and selected a line of self-care products suitable for cancer patients. I believe that how we feel has a great impact on our overall health, and patients living with incurable cancer are no exception to this.